As enterprises adopt cloud data warehouses, marketers are right to demand that their MarTech work with the data they already have.
Zero-copy MarTech has great promise: it allows marketers to access and use all of their data (from the data warehouse where their companies store it) without creating expensive and risk-inducing copies. But when I talk to marketing leaders about it, I hear a lot of skepticism. The reason: MarTech vendors are using the words “zero-copy” too liberally to capture demand. Marketers have already been burned by vendors who promise “zero-copy” infrastructure but fail to deliver.
How can you tell an actual “zero-copy” MarTech, AI Decisioning products, and customer data platforms (CDP) from imposters? To help you evaluate your vendor’s truthfulness, I’ll use this blog to dive deep into two examples so you can distinguish truly zero-copy MarTech from companies misusing the term.
- On the negative side, I’ll look at Salesforce Data Cloud. They aren’t the only vendor falsely promising zero-copy solutions, but they are prominent and have outspoken customers who’ve shared shortcomings.
- On the positive side, I’ll share what we’re seeing at Hightouch with the Composable CDP and AI Decisioning, which operates entirely within a user’s data warehouse.
Case study: Misleading zero-copy claims in Salesforce Data Cloud
Salesforce extensively markets its “zero-copy” capabilities with data warehouses. Unfortunately, we’ve learned from users that Salesforce Data Cloud typically operates on an incomplete copy of the data.
There are two directions to Salesforce’s “zero-copy”:
- Salesforce Data Cloud → Your Warehouse, via data sharing
- Your Warehouse → Salesforce Data Cloud, via BYOL data federation
Salesforce Data Cloud → Warehouse: This feature uses warehouse-native data-sharing capabilities. It allows data teams to access Salesforce data directly within their own warehouse instance for analytics and BI
This functionality works well! Salesforce stores data in a warehouse instance that they manage, which you can then access via a data share inside your owned warehouse instance. You get to use this data without storing it in your own instance.
Warehouse → Salesforce Data Cloud: Salesforce calls this direction’s technology Bring-Your-Own-Lake (BYOL) data federation. It is supposed to make data warehouse data accessible inside Salesforce Data Cloud so marketers can build audiences and act on their warehouse data, without copying it.
Accessing data in this direction is much more complicated than via data sharing. There are two variants of this direction:
- Copy it into Salesforce Data Cloud – Salesforce refers to this copy as an “accelerated data object.” In reality, this means you query the warehouse and copy the entire dataset into an object within Data Cloud. Salesforce will typically recommend this option since it will allow their audience queries to be much more performant. It is, quite literally, not a zero-copy solution: you must copy your data into Salesforce Data Cloud.
- Run a blended query – This gets closest to the spirit of zero-copy, and allows an audience query to directly blend across data stored natively within Data Cloud and data within your warehouse. However, customers have revealed hat this solution does not scale well, and is completely incompatible with tables greater than several million rows. Furthermore, although the underlying data stays within the warehouse, the actual results of any audience would get published and stored within Data Cloud.
Salesforce’s zero-copy architecture is only truly zero-copy when moving from Salesforce to the data warehouse. Directly using warehouse data within Salesforce Data Cloud via BYOL requires extra work and ongoing maintenance, is unnecessarily expensive, and actually makes a copy of your data into Salesforce’s infrastructure. Plus, you have to re-model your data to match how Salesforce expects it to look, and face tons of limitations for high-scale and high-speed workloads.
Truly “Composable” tools operate directly in your data warehouse without data copy. This means that when you use them, you have full access to your data. There is no rigid schema your data needs to conform to, or volume restrictions with hidden fees.
Composable MarTech allow marketers to run their campaigns from inside of the data warehouse.
This allows them to analyze and act on your data without making a copy of it, and work with your data “as-is,” without requiring you to conform it to a pre-set schema like Salesforce. Compute occurs in your warehouse, which is far more affordable and faster than Salesforce Data Cloud.
The promise of “zero-copy” tooling is incredible: give marketing and business teams access to your complete data, where it lives, in the format it’s already in. The best AI Decisioning products also run from the warehouse, again because of that complete data.
When evaluating zero-copy MarTech, however, you’ll have to tread carefully because vendors are overselling their capabilities to win their business. Hopefully, these two examples help clarify what real zero-copy MarTech can do and what pitfalls you should avoid.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tejas Manohar, cofounder/co-CEO of Hightouch
Tejas Manohar is the cofounder/co-CEO of Hightouch. Prior to founding Hightouch, Tejas was an early engineer at Segment, the leading company in the Customer Data Platform (CDP) space that was acquired by Twilio for $3.2B. At Segment, Tejas realized that many of the challenges of building a best-in-class CDP would be better solved on top of the data warehouse and a modern data stack and hence, he founded Hightouch. When Tejas isn’t thinking about data, he likes running and playing competitive table tennis.