Think back five years.

2013 feels like a lifetime ago now—but marketing, growth, and engagement teams then were still trying to accomplish the same things: understand their audience; reach them effectively; and nudge them to engage and convert and become loyal customers. Brands needed to be able to move information seamlessly between systems, in order to support a data-driven approach to customer engagement. But back then, no one knew if the technologies of the day could work together to help them make that a reality.

The big marketing clouds argued that the only way to make it happen was to have all the systems that impacted customer engagement owned by one monolithic vendor. But the joke was on all of us. When agencies and marketers tried to use the marketing clouds to provide relevant, responsive brand experiences, they found out the hard way that the dream they’d been sold was just that: a dream. Companies struggled with data silos, Push pipes that couldn’t talk to email platforms operated by the same marketing cloud, and customers who couldn’t understand why the brands they loved were treating them like strangers.

That status quo had to change. And now it has.

A New Era of Data Agility: Introducing Braze Alloys

At the 2017 LTR conference, Braze announced our Currents real-time data export feature, which made it possible for brands to move nuanced first-party data between the Braze platform and other parts of our clients’ customer engagement ecosystems. Analytics solutions. Data warehouses. Data management platforms. And a lot more, besides. Once you have a tool like this, a whole world opens up.

Today, we’re making it easier for our clients to make their vision of a comprehensive, interconnected tech ecosystem a reality...and to bring their customers a more compelling, more connected brand experience. I’m pleased to announce Braze Alloys, a major evolution of how the Braze platform interacts with other technologies.

We’ve found that our clients see better results when they have an ecosystem that’s customized to fit their unique needs and use cases—and Braze Alloys is designed to make it faster and easier for brands to leverage Braze in conjunction with other technologies impacting the customer experience. That’s key because Braze now supports technical partnerships and integrations with 45 technologies across six key technology categories:

1. Data & Infrastructure Agility (including hosting and data management solutions)
2. Insights (including data analytics and visualization platforms)
3. Channel Extensions (including A/B testing, translation, and email add-on solutions)
4. Additional Channels (including SMS, OTT messaging, and direct mail integrations)
5. Data Augmentation (including ML, location, and weather data platforms)
6. Advertising Technologies (including attribution and deep linking software)

With Braze Alloys, we’ve created a simple, scalable system for adding new technology partners to our Braze Partnership Program. Braze Alloys will make it easier for our clients to use Braze in concert with an ever-wider range of technologies (via direct integration, API, and webhook) to support highly personalized, highly effective brand experiences at scale.

What does that look like? Ask leading European food delivery brand Deliveroo. This mobile-first innovator took advantage of Braze in concert with the Looker data visualization and analytics platform to visualize Currents data in order to better optimize their brand experience. By leveraging this integration, Deliveroo was able to democratize data access, allowing teams across the company to self-serve when it comes to engagement and customer data and reducing the time burden on their time burden by 8x. That’s transformative.

What’s Coming With Braze Alloys

The importance of Braze Alloys isn’t just about what you can do when you bring Braze and other best-in-class technologies together today—it’s also about what you’re going to be able to do tomorrow. And Braze recently announced a number of upcoming initiatives that will significantly expand what Braze Alloys makes possible, including:

• Google Cloud partnership — Braze customers will be able to stream data directly into Google Cloud using Currents and seamlessly use Big Query to analyze your Braze data
• Roku native SDK — Building on our existing support for Apple’s tvOS, Braze will be expanding our OTT support to allow customers to incorporate Roku into the ecosystem of web, mobile, and email that Braze already provides, supporting second-screen messaging and re-engagement campaigns
• WhatsApp messaging support via Twilio — Braze customers will be able to leverage our existing Braze Alloys partnership with Twilio to support customer engagement via WhatsApp Business Messaging, opening up a new audience of more than a billion monthly active users

How To Get Started

To get all the details on Braze Alloys—from what technologies are supported and how new partners can build Braze integrations to what’s possible when the Braze platform is used as part of a best-in-class technology ecosystem—visit Braze.com/alloys.