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Turn your Data Warehouse into a Marketing Platform: Part 1

Mar 31, 2022
Luke Ambrosetti

MessageGears Architecture

Welcome to part 1 of 2 in the “Turn your Data Warehouse into a Marketing Platform” series.

We follow a hybrid-SaaS approach, using both single-tenant and multi-tenant components. The single-tenant component, MessageGears Accelerator, is a hosted web application that typically lives in your Virtual Private Cloud or your legacy on-premises data center.

This application is how MessageGears acts as a consumer of your database or data warehouse data, without anyone from the MessageGears team having direct access to your data source. The application connects to all the popular databases and data warehouses directly in one of two main methods, Native Data Warehouse API or JDBC driver. MessageGears can also optionally host Accelerator as a managed service while still operating as a connected-app.

The multi-tenant component, MessageGears Cloud, is a collection of APIs that is used for all three products.

MessageGears Products

MessageGears Message

MessageGears Message is a Cross-Channel Messaging Provider (CCMP), which is an evolution from the more popular term Email Service Provider (ESP). Almost every traditional ESP operates in a standard SaaS format: you sync your data to them via SFTP or API, and then again collect data from them in a similar process. As a connected app, MessageGears eliminates both of these steps while still providing the speed and scale of a traditional SaaS platform. 

For Message, Accelerator leverages the direct connection to let users build audiences on their own data. Whether the user is using our no-code Drag + Drop audience builder or our advanced templated SQL engine, we pass the final SQL directly through to your warehouse. Accelerator also acts as asset storage for email, push, and SMS templates, which includes a scheduler, and all of the features you expect from a traditional SaaS ESP.

The MessageGears Cloud renders, delivers, and captures analytics all messages. PII is never kept within the MessageGears Cloud. 

MessageGears Segment

MessageGears Segment is the only data segmentation and activation (Reverse ETL) tool that is built for marketers. Through Blueprints, it helps non-technical users create no-code segments and customized data transformations that are applied before the data is activated/synced to an external SaaS application.

For Segment, Accelerator gives you access to all of the audience builder tools as Message and more. In addition to extracting data, Accelerator can also load transformed data back into your data warehouse, regardless of whether that data is activated to an external destination.

The MessageGears Cloud integrates the data from the customer’s warehouse with their desired destination. Destinations include, but are not limited to Facebook, Google, Airship, LiveRamp, and Cloud Storage (S3, GCS, and Azure). Data from Segment is never kept within the MessageGears Cloud.

MessageGears Engage

MessageGears Engage is the very first Marketing API-as-a-Service, which lets marketers decide what data from their data warehouse they want to surface for external vendors or other internal teams.

For Engage, Accelerator lets technical marketers write templated SQL to create one or more datasets to be promoted and accessible via API. It allows for an incremental approach, allowing incremental refreshes in up to 15-minute intervals and full dataset replacements up to 8-hour intervals, where both intervals can be customized. 

The MessageGears Cloud hosts the data and indexes the data for low-latency transactions via API.

About the Author

Luke Ambrosetti

Luke is the Head of Solutions Engineering at MessageGears. His mission is to make our clients successful in every possible way – primarily through new client onboarding. You’ll often see him in industry Slack channels or banging on his drumset.