The explosion of SaaS tools in sales and marketing departments has led to the flow of customer data into numerous third-party organizations. Sometimes the data flow is necessary but often we don’t even understand what data is being collected by which sdk and what integration. Also, these third-party tools tend to collect more data than necessary for their functionality. Finally, with data privacy regulations around the horizon such as GDPR and CCPA, both having a good understanding of customer data flow within the organization and outside the organization has become more important than ever. 

We built Rudder with a focus on privacy and security. Large organizations are increasingly under pressure to comply with privacy and security requirements and also deliver high growth with sales and marketing pressure. Rudder is an open source alternative to Segment built with a focus on Privacy and Security for Enterprises, written in Go and React.

Rudder allows you to see on a per-user basis the flow of customer data across your entire software stack. Moreover, the customer data never leaves your infrastructure. You decide what data needs to go where based on the Rudder control plane. Because the data never leaves your infrastructure, you can be rest assured that your customer data is only being used in the ways you intended it to be. It also vastly reduces the burden of the security and compliance teams to ensure high integrity usage of data. Rudder allows to send only the data that is needed by a third-party tool and not more. It brings transparency into the data exchange protocols which are otherwise opaque and hard to understand. 

Rudder replaces several third party sdks and integrations into one Rudder SDK. Rudder allows the ability to control customer data flow into various internal and external tools. It also leads to the benefit of performance improvement as several sdks and integrations get replaced by Rudder SDK. You will see an improvement in the load times of your pages, an important metric for google while ranking the search results. The impact is even bigger on mobile. It also replaces the need for integration with each individual third-party tool, unlocking rapid iteration for the product and growth teams. 

 

Finally, open source enables the extensibility and customization needed often for enterprises. In our previous experience at large organizations, we often found ourselves struggling to extend software tools to adapt to our complex needs. It is not uncommon to see S3, Redshift, Snowflake, Azure all being supported in the same organization for various reasons. We believe that open source is a great alternative to proprietary tools, especially for fundamental infrastructure such as data collection and routing layer. It also allows for a vibrant community to support a wide array of integrations. However, having an organization behind the open source project, you receive the best of both worlds – enterprise grade product and enterprise level support coupled with the advantages of open source.

We are very excited about our journey in building Rudder. If you find these problems interesting, do sign up for a demo and/or consider joining our team. We are just getting started.