Customer data management platform provider Segment Inc. today announced it’s launching a new data lake product that it says will enable businesses to do more with their customer data.

Segment sells a namesake customer data platform that companies can use to collect all the data about their own customer interactions and from there send that data to any marketing or business tool where it’s needed. It allows marketing teams to process that data easily, without needing to build their own customer data integrations.

For example, a retailer could use Segment’s platform to blend its own website buyer information with in-store purchasing activity. From there, a company could then use this dataset in a marketing tool to identify in-demand products that should be prioritized in marketing campaigns.

Segment’s data management platform is designed to work with traditional data warehouses, which aggregate information from one or more sources so that it can be compared and analyzed for business use. But data warehouses have limitations, because they can only store “structured data.”

That limits companies to using Structured Query Language-only tools for analysis. And that’s a problem in a day and age when most companies possess vast amounts of unstructured information on their customers too. In addition, data warehouses can become expensive to maintain because of the associated costs of storage that occur as data volumes multiply.

“We all know that customer data creates a competitive advantage, but what companies sometimes fail to recognize is that the quality of their data architecture will determine just how significant that advantage really is,” Segment Chief Product Development Officer Tido Carriero said in a statement. “Segment Data Lakes gives data scientists the foundation they need to unlock the full potential of their customer data, so they can build better products and provide world-class customer experiences.”

The new Segment Data Lakes platform is what the company calls a specialized customer data lake that’s aimed at enabling companies to perform more advanced analytics on their customer data. It essentially future-proofs company’s information technology architectures, enabling their analytics operations to scale with the needs of their business, Segment said. It also helps enable new artificial intelligence initiatives that draw on historic data sets that data warehouses were never designed to hold.

One of the main advantages of Segment Data Lakes it that it helps companies to schematize and optimize customer data to make it more accessible and easier for their marketing teams to use. It can also help to manage and reduce storage costs and free up engineering teams from maintaining inefficient data architectures, so they can focus on building new products and features instead.

“Customer data is essential to delivering exceptional products and experiences, but since data lakes are difficult to build and maintain, few businesses have the architecture in place to truly make the most of it,” said Daniel Newman, principal analyst at Futurum Research. “As a data lake built specifically for customer data, Segment Data Lakes provides the foundation to unlock complex use cases like machine learning and advanced analytics, so businesses can do more with their data and power deeper personalization of the customer journey.”

Segment said its new data lake platform is available for customers using Amazon Web Services now, with availability on Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud to follow.

Image: rawpixel.com – www.freepik.com