Navigating Build vs Buy at CleverTap (What if Michelangelo had used clip art to paint the Sistine Chapel)

Sunil Thomas Cofounder & CEO, CleverTap

•  Strong foundation of Analytics •  Flexible ad-hoc discovery of patterns

The Problem Statement

Relevant

Timely

Personalized

Relevant, Timely & Personalized Messaging at Massive Scale

•  Interactive Speeds •  Realtime

•  On Demand availability of data •  Don’t know what fields are important when

The Foundation of Analytics

★ “Traditional” Analytics -  Reports, Trends -  Metrics: DAUs, MAUs -  Funnels, Cohorts

★ Actionable Analytics -  Interactive Speeds -  Realtime

★ Prescriptive Analytics -  Need Control -  Hard to model all problems as Map & Reduce

Breaking it down one more layer

The Ground Reality …

★ 3 Tech Founders at a friend’s Conference Room

★ No Money, No Resources

★ Time to Market was the #1 Priority – by far!

2013. 3 years ago.

The Good Engineers …

★ Storage Stack was going to make or break this

★ What can we start with?

★ Too many Advantages -  Lesser Unknowns, Tested -  Future Hiring, Skills -  …

★ Focus on Scalable Architecture

With Time to Market as Key

•  Traditional DBs mostly work ( Hadoop, SQL, etc. )

Evaluating Possibilities

Actionable Analytics

•  Traditional DBs start breaking down -  Indexing, Optimizing for RAM usage

•  Having full Control was critical -  Running ML models, linear regressions etc.

Traditional Analytics

Prescriptive Analytics

The Hard Decision

We decided to Build ★ Benefit of solving for a limited problem

-  Time Series -  Events & Properties -  Compression – Enumerations, Using every BIT optimally

★ Dev. Ops / IT Side Considerations -  We struggled with Hadoop when it went down

Only way (in our mind) we could get 1.  Control 2.  Scale

Where we are Today?

2016. 3 years in the Making.

★ 2700+ mobile apps and websites

★ 1+ Billion Events processed daily

★ 80+ Million messages sent daily

★ 650+ Million devices

Core Technology Advantage for our business

Our Customer’s Perspective

★ Their Data: Custom Events & Properties -  Blazing Fast Analytics … adhoc, discovery @ scale -  Industry leading user segmentation engine

★ Dead Simple Integration: -  2 API Calls to get a 360 view to understand and engage with your users

★ Magical go-live experience! -  Live user Segments -  Automated Action / In-Action Campaigns

Your Own Build vs. Buy Decision

« What technical skills do you need? -  Can you find them? -  Can you afford them?

« Can you nail your problem statement before your runway disappears -  How much advantage in the market does

an optimized solution give you?

BUY « How much time will you save?

« How much $ will you save? -  It is not just software cost

« How much of the problem statement will it fulfill -  Typically it’s 75% or less -  Is a 75% solution good enough for your

market?

BUILD

No One can Say it Better

Questions

Sunil Thomas sunil@clevertap.com @suniltom