Introducing the Blotout Technical Blog Series

We believe that every human has the right to privacy and trustworthy handling of their data. The world needs new technologies that enable accurate analysis of customer insights while protecting consumer privacy.

Our mission is to fill the gap in data tooling that has grown as the digital world migrates toward an era of trust and respect for user data.

While regulations, platform changes, and user protections (like ad blocking and tracking prevention) have all sped along, the tools that companies use to capture, manage, and analyze customer data have not kept pace.

As a result, when we talk to customers, they tell us that the following are top of mind:

1. The death of the third-party cookie and their need to use first-party identities for measurement
2. Data loss problems because of consumers blocking third-party SaaS tools
3. The inefficiency — cost and architecture — of using dozens of third-party SaaS vendors
4. What it means for their customer relationships when they don’t control their own data
5. How they can manage privacy and consent for all their customer data
6. The benefits of cloud prem over third-party SaaS

What we’ve built

As a result, we’ve built the first privacy data engineering platform that deploys in a company’s cloud prem, enabling complete data integration, consent with purpose, and the ability to develop enterprise identity resolution that makes possible data hubs with privacy at their core. Cloud prem Privacy engineering as a service in a box!

Why we’ve built it

Companies today must manage the intersection of two major shifts in customer data. The first is that data is becoming increasingly siloed among third-party vendors, demanding serious engineering effort and expertise to pull and unify that data to make it usable across organizations. The second is that having control of the data is not enough — if companies do not have consent, for the purpose they seek, they cannot use that data without violating privacy regulations. At the same time, engineering costs continue to rise.

In response, we’ve built a data engineering platform that solves this for any enterprise globally; asking your engineers to be lawyers is taxing and we help relieve those issues rapidly by being an infra and a privacy stack at the same time.

Our long-term vision

Customers will align with the brands that can build trust and earn their loyalty. Brands will do this by building a direct relationship with their users, and that will only be possible by being the primary stewards of their data. Our vision is to enable a democratic world where every enterprise can have that ability to manage their own data with integrity and transparency, building customer loyalty.

So, what is Blotout?

Blotout is a no code privacy engineering as a service with vertical solutions prebuilt for:

1. Marketing analytics and attribution — multi touch measurements
2. Product analytics and personalization APIs
3. Consent and purpose management
4. SSO data platform for networked providers that want to build deeper relationships
5. Privacy incident and event management (like SIEM but for Privacy incidents)

Every unit of data possesses associated consent and purpose, providing privacy-by-design for every use case, including data anonymization.

The platform consists of the following components:

• Docker deployment (managed via Argo CD) in your cloud prem
• Enterprise ID resolution for any user (zero code mapping)
• Integrated consent and purpose to the Graph ID (Mid Q3)
• Native SDK for you to collect events (both system and coded) to your cloud prem
• EL and T using OSS tools; zero code event and Graph ID mapping
• A privacy incident and event management stack (Late Q3)
• Scaled API and Airflow support
• Organizational workspaces (Personal, Marketing, Product, Engineering, Compliance)
• Governed Superset integration for unlimited BI and charting needs
• Reverse EL and T using synthetic data (Q4, 2021)

Our value proposition to engineering teams:

• Turnkey data plumbing for your lake or warehouse ($1M in annual cost savings)
• Easy like SaaS but works in your cloud prem — sign up and go!
• Privacy by design, so engineers don’t have to be lawyers
• Open Sourcing the common core — if we die you keep it

What are we not?

Blotout is not a data pipe or workflow company. We provide intelligence as data infrastructure — whether it’s risk, ROI, or customer journeys — in your cloud premise. We further enable comprehensive insights across the span and breadth of your data. Finally, we understand that data is a multi-organizational priority, so we help you break the silos.

And what do customers use it for?

We have three primary use cases today.

Data infrastructure as a service, One stack to replace your SaaS partners

Many of our customers have replaced Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Metabase, Matomo, Segment.io, Looker, GCP, etc. with Blotout as a single, unified platform for their customer data.

Product & Marketing analytics

Blotout is an optimal cloud prem analytics alternative for customers who are hurting from data loss (driven by tracking prevention which blocks third-party analytics tools). Once they realize this capability within their own infrastructure, they typically expand to much richer use cases (unifying disparate data sources, etc.) that were difficult or impossible with third-party tools. We natively support AWS via S3, Redshift, or Snowflake.

First-party data monetization stack

With the increasing significance of consent and the death of third-party cookies, our customers use our built-in ML tools to segment users and build audience lookalikes that can monetize without sharing data.

Thank you for reading.

Team Blotout.

Originally published at blotout.io