Amplitude customer data platform challenges Twilio, Salesforce, Adobe

Analytics firm Amplitude has launched a new Customer Data Platform (CDP), betting on an aggressive pricing strategy to undercut competition from vendors including Twilio, Salesforce, Adobe and Oracle.

The pricing strategy is similar to the game plan Amplitude used against analytics rival MixPanel back in 2014. The company had offered a freemium model in contrast to MixPanel’s paid service, helping it not only rake up customers but also attract new investors.  

The CDP market is growing, and is forecast to reach $20.5 billion by 2027, according to a report from Research and Markets. The Amplitude CDP will be a fraction of the price of Twilio Segment and will adhere to more simplified tiering.

Amplitude CDP has been made available to Amplitude customers in an early access program this week and will be generally available later this year, the company said, adding that the platform will be free of charge for customers streaming fewer than 10 million events per month. In this context, event streaming means interactions or transactions with customers that are sent to the CDP database and analytics engine.

CDP accelerates time to data insights

The new CDP platform comes with features such as a unified user interface, event streaming, audience syncing — a process that groups customers together for marketing and sales campaigns, for example —  and a developer toolkit. The features are designed to improve data quality, reduce costs and accelerate time to data insights, according to Amplitude.

With the help of the unified user interface, enterprises can create a single taxonomy for all digital analytics use cases, to collect and capture consistent data in one UI, the company said, adding that this helps with data planning, governance and engineering.

The platform also comes with an event streaming feature allowing any customer enterprise to federate data to marketing tech (martech), advertising, and data pipelines such as Amazon Kinesis and Google Pub/Sub through a no-code configurable UI in a Data Connections catalog.  

Data Connections is a tool that combines different technologies — such as APIs, SDKs, event streams, and audience exports — to bring customer data inside Amplitude’s analytics engine and CDP database.

In order to reduce costs, the company said that it has built analytics natively within the CDP platform. This means that enterprises can gather, clean and plan data along with generating insights and taking actions as required to better customer experience.

Amplitude, which claims that it has over 1,700 customers, including 26 out of the Fortune 100 companies, and more than 700 employees, will also face competition from the likes of Amperity CDP, Bloomreach Engagement, BlueConic and Treasure Data CDP. The company was founded by Jeffrey Wang, Spenser Saktes and Curtis Liu in 2012.