Today, we’re thrilled to announce the General Availability (GA) of Tealium’s new outbound integration with Databricks, a leading data and AI company. This milestone empowers our customers to seamlessly connect their rich, real-time customer data from Tealium with the powerful analytics and machine learning capabilities of Databricks, fueling a new era of data-driven insights and AI-powered customer experiences.
Use Cases: Powering Your Databricks Lakehouse with Real-Time Customer Data
Our conversations with leading enterprises across various industries have showcased a wide range of powerful use cases for the Tealium Databricks outbound integration:
Comprehensive Customer Journey Analytics: As demonstrated by a major sports organization, companies can ingest Tealium event data and merge it with other internal data sources (like Application Insights) within Databricks. This creates a unified, holistic view of customer journeys, enabling deeper analysis of user behaviors, configurations, and choices across various applications.
Visitor Profile Data Replication for Fast Sizing and Analysis: A leading airline leverages Tealium’s visitor profile data, flowing into Databricks, to replicate known visitors and blend it with other datasets. This provides a “fast sizing tool” for audiences and allows for easy analysis and intersection of segments, optimizing marketing strategies. This also provides comprehensive insights into visitor interactions, helping to understand behavior and refine strategies.
Raw Event Data for Analytics, Insights, and Proof of Concepts (POCs): The same airline also utilizes the integration to pull raw event data for detailed analytics, proof-of-concept work, and validation of changes. This granular data helps them understand user interactions and improve customer experiences.
Audience Event Analysis for Real-Time Targeting: Simple audience events (e.g., joining or leaving an audience) captured by Tealium and sent to Databricks enable real-time targeting and campaign optimization. This allows for personalized product recommendations based on user behavior, leading to improved conversion rates.
Behavioral Modeling and Predictive Analytics: A major insurance provider exports raw data from Tealium’s Audience Store to their Azure storage account, where Databricks processes it for creating dashboards and powering machine learning models. These models are used to predict user behavior across various touchpoints, fueling proactive customer engagement.
Improved Reporting and Advertising Efficiency: Another insurance company aims to integrate Tealium data into their Databricks Lakehouse to enhance reporting on customer behavior, segment performance, and the efficiency of their advertising tools.
How It Works: A Secure and Streamlined Outbound Data Flow
The Tealium Databricks outbound integration provides a secure, scalable, and efficient data flow from Tealium to your Databricks Lakehouse. It operates by seamlessly connecting Tealium with your existing, customer-provided cloud storage solution (AWS S3, Azure Blob Storage, or Google Cloud Storage), which Databricks then accesses.
Data Collection & Enrichment in Tealium: Tealium’s Customer Data Platform (CDP) collects, cleanses, enriches, and unifies your real-time customer event and visitor profile data across all your digital touchpoints. This ensures that only high-quality, consented data is prepared for export.
Secure Data Transfer to Your Cloud Storage: Using the Tealium Databricks connector, this prepared data is securely streamed or batched into your dedicated cloud storage bucket through Tealium Cloudstream. Cloudstream ensures reliable, scalable data delivery with built-in retry mechanisms and monitoring capabilities, guaranteeing your data reaches its destination even under high-volume conditions. This is a crucial element: you maintain full control and ownership of your data within your cloud environment. This approach directly addresses the strong security and data residency requirements expressed by clients across industries. The connector also allows for the flexibility to pass custom data, rather than the entire payload, a feature enterprise customers appreciate for meeting their specific data transformation requirements.
Databricks Ingestion and Processing Facilitated by Tealium: Once data lands in your cloud storage, the Tealium Databricks connector’s management layer takes over. This layer is designed to significantly simplify the Databricks setup.
- It can automatically create the necessary Databricks notebook, pipeline, and job needed to pull the data from the cloud storage.
- This automated setup ensures that your data is efficiently processed in Databricks and landed into the target catalog and table that you specify, streamlining the entire data pipeline and accelerating time to value.
The Solution: Unlocking Real-Time, AI-Ready Customer Data
The Tealium Databricks outbound integration fundamentally solves the challenges of data fragmentation, delayed insights, and limited activation capabilities that plague many modern data strategies. It directly addresses the need for clean, real-time customer data to fuel advanced analytics and AI/ML initiatives.
Breaks Down Data Silos & Improves Data Accessibility: By centralizing Tealium’s rich, real-time customer behavioral data directly within your Databricks Lakehouse, you create a single, unified source of truth for all customer insights. This enables better collaboration between marketing, data science, and analytics teams, as highlighted by insurance companies’ goals to improve reporting by integrating Tealium data into their Lakehouse.
Accelerates Speed to Insight & Action: The real-time streaming capabilities mean that your Databricks environment is constantly updated with the latest customer behaviors. This enables immediate analysis, faster model training, and more agile campaign optimization. Organizations no longer have to wait for cumbersome batch processes to complete, leading to more responsive decision-making.
Fuels AI & Machine Learning Initiatives: Provide your data scientists with clean, consented, and continuously updated customer data at scale, directly from the source of customer interaction. This is essential for building more accurate predictive models, sophisticated segmentation, and truly personalized customer experiences, as emphasized by the joint focus of Tealium and Databricks on AI-driven CDP capabilities.
Ensures Data Governance and Compliance: Tealium’s robust consent management and data governance capabilities ensure that data flowing into Databricks is privacy-compliant from the start. This simplifies your governance efforts and builds trust with your customers, a critical concern for regulated industries like insurance and finance.
Reduces Manual Effort & Integration Costs: The out-of-the-box connector significantly reduces the need for custom coding and ongoing maintenance of data pipelines. This frees up valuable engineering resources to focus on data analysis and innovation, rather than integration plumbing. Enterprise feedback indicates that direct implementation capabilities would have been valuable for early adopters, perfectly illustrating this pain point.
Learn more about why Databricks and Tealium are Better Together
https://tealium.com/technology-partner/databricks-tealium-better-together
