AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
A Composable Customer Data Stack with ActionIQ CX Hub and Amazon Redshift
By Florian Delval, Director Technical Product Marketing Manager – ActionIQ
By Mackenzie Johnson, Sr. Partner Marketing Manager – ActionIQ
By Sudhir Gupta, Principal Solutions Architect – AWS
By Dathu Patil, Sr. Solutions Architect – AWS
 |
| ActionIQ |
 |
IT teams are always exploring solutions to increase their existing investments and looking for solutions that answer business needs in line with IT objectives.
One of the hot topics the past few years has been providing customer data access to business teams, a value achievable via the deployment of a customer data platform (CDP). These are built to help business teams resolve the bottlenecks and technical challenges that prevent them from becoming self-serving and customer-centric.
Previously, organizations wanting to benefit from a customer data platform had to buy a pre-packaged solution. The first step in using a pre-packaged CDP, also referred to as bundled CDP, has been to copy data from the source—often a data warehouse—into the CDP.
So, what’s the problem? Businesses have invested years centralizing data in their data warehouse, using the Amazon Redshift cloud data warehouse to build a 360-degree view of the customer. Creating new copies means new data pipelines to create and maintain, and new data storage locations to keep track of and align with regulatory requirements.
On top of the cost to this approach, IT teams are losing control. This is why organizations are looking at alternative solutions which enable them to adopt a composable architecture across everything they do, and to enable a scalable infrastructure and increased flexibility.
Enter the composable CDP with zero data copy.
In this post, you will learn the benefits of adopting a composable CDP, discover ActionIQ’s Customer Experience (CX) Hub, and understand how AWS Partner ActionIQ and Amazon Redshift enable a composable CDP.
Benefits of Composable CDP
IT teams have discovered the value and efficiencies associated with an unbundled approach, and there’s no looking back.
With the introduction of modern cloud technology, IT professionals can create scalable data warehouses to centralize customer data and use it as the single source of truth for their business. As a result, the need to accommodate outside vendors’ technology limitations—or to constantly copy customer data over to another system—has been significantly reduced.
By simply syncing data with last-mile execution tools and immediately pushing it from the data warehouse to the channel, organizations lose out on the value of centralized intelligence. IT teams can now maximize the value of centralized data without sacrificing the benefits of a pre-packaged CDP.
The benefits of a composable CDP, include:
- Choice: IT teams aren’t forced to purchase everything—only what they need.
- Control: IT teams can control data access and replication to improve data security and governance.
- Agility: IT teams can swap out solutions as necessary to improve efficiency and keep costs under control.
- Innovation: IT teams can plug and play different solutions to quickly expand capabilities.
- Savings: IT teams can leverage existing investments.
Instead of being forced to rely on bundled technologies, organizations can now achieve greater productivity and performance using solutions tailored to their own unique business needs.
By augmenting and amplifying the power of data warehouses with the right technologies, IT teams can maximize the value of their investments while ensuring they have the ability to add new capabilities if and when the need arises.
Ultimately, the power lies with IT teams to build the composable CDP that works best for their objectives while making sure this undertaking also supports the needs of the business.
ActionIQ Overview
The ActionIQ Customer Experience (CX) Hub was built to empower everyone to be a CX champion by giving business teams the freedom to explore and take action on customer data. It also helps technical teams extend and enhance existing technology investments to manage data governance, costs and performance.
Figure 1 – ActionIQ CX Hub offers a user-friendly UI for business teams.
Built on market-leading technology provided by AWS, AIQ CX Hub is composed of five modules, each addressing a different set of use cases:
- Customer 360: Create a single source of customer truth and obtain a comprehensive view of every customer.
- Identity: Manage and resolve identities across anonymous and known customers across first, second, and third-party data sources of your choice, respecting privacy regulations.
- Audience segmentation: Advanced self-service segmentation and activation, augmented with customized lookalike modeling.
- Journey management: Coordinated omnichannel journeys and testing automated across hundreds of out-of-the-box integrations.
- Real-time customer experiences: Streaming and historical data combined to inform real-time inbound and outbound experiences.
The AIQ CX Hub is leveraged by organizations to support customer experience use cases across the entire lifecycle, from acquisition (prospecting, retargeting, suppression) to growth and retention (onboarding, upsell, churn prevention).
Composable CDP with ActionIQ and Amazon Redshift
ActionIQ’s platform is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution developed using AWS technologies and hosted on the AWS Cloud. It provides an innovative approach to deploy its platform, using HybridCompute which is a feature of InfiniteCompute.
In this section, we’ll provide an overview of the solution integrated directly on top of your Amazon Redshift infrastructure, in a zero data copy architecture approach.
Figure 2 – Composable CDP architecture with ActionIQ and Amazon Redshift.
Sources, Ingest, and Transformation
The expectation is that most data sources feed directly to the Amazon Redshift centralized repository of your organization. Data can be cleaned, organized, and given access to by following IT choices.
In scenarios where data is required for use cases executed in ActionIQ and not yet available in your Redshift instance, ActionIQ offers options to ingest data via both batch and streaming pipelines.
Storage
If IT teams decide to ingest data into ActionIQ, it will be stored in a CX data store backed by Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). In a scenario using an HybridCompute deployment, a connection to Redshift is created and allows ActionIQ to discover tables and data available. Only views—data mapping—will be stored in ActionIQ.
Query and Processing
Queries on data stored in ActionIQ will be executed via InfiniteCompute’s purpose-built and elastic query engine. HybridCompute can generate the SQL query, optimized for Amazon Redshift, from user requests and push it down to your data warehouse, where the centralized data is stored.
Once the execution is complete, using Reverse ETL, Redshift will only return the necessary data to ActionIQ, usually a list of customer ids. That result can be surfaced to the user in the platform user interface (UI).
CX Hub Applications and Destinations
ActionIQ provides a set of business applications with a self-service UI for users, allowing them to build audiences, collect insights, activate to external platforms, and more. The tools don’t require SQL knowledge and don’t need to understand where the data is stored or being queried. IT keeps control on where the data is stored and queried.
The Uniqueness of ActionIQ’s HybridCompute Solution
Contrary to alternative solutions leveraging data sharing capabilities of data warehouse solutions, ActionIQ does not spin up an instance of Amazon Redshift to compute the query in its own cloud. Instead, AIQ leverages the Redshift compute available directly where the data is being stored.
As mentioned earlier, in scenarios where data would be missing in Amazon Redshift to execute business use cases, ActionIQ is still allowing organizations to ingest data via its flexible batch and streaming pipelines. HybridCompute technology is able to split and execute the query where the source is stored, and join the results in post-processing of the queries.
Summary
Leading organizations are adopting composable architectures to enable them to select the best solutions that fit their current and future needs. This remains true for those looking to adopt a customer data platform (CDP).
ActionIQ is an AWS ISV Accelerate Partner whose software is available in AWS Marketplace. AIQ proposes a composable architecture via its HybridCompute technology for businesses looking to take advantage of centralized data stored in Amazon Redshift. HybridCompute lets you copy all, some, or none of your data to AIQ via its native reverse extract, transform, load (ETL) capabilities.
Key takeaways:
- Zero data copy can be achieved with a composable architecture, giving IT teams peace of mind by keeping full control on where data is stored and queried.
- ActionIQ enables IT teams to take advantage of centralized data while simultaneously maintaining a flexible, secure, and scalable architecture.
- ActionIQ’s new HybridCompute technology, powered by AWS, enables every team member to be a CX champion. It gives business teams the freedom to explore and action on customer data, while helping technical teams extend and enhance existing Redshift investments.
If you’re looking to increase the value of your existing Amazon Redshift investment, learn more about ActionIQ and schedule a demo.
.
.
ActionIQ – AWS Partner Spotlight
ActionIQ is an AWS Partner and customer data platform (CDP) for business, marketing, and analytics.