Mixpanel + Segment: Platform of Independents

Scaling your business while staying innovative is hard when your data is locked into a single walled garden. As customer expectations shift, the flexibility to adjust your technology stack becomes critical. After all, software tools should match a business’s needs at any given moment, not the other way around.

Because innovation can’t happen with a one-size-fits-all approach, Mixpanel has partnered with Segment and over a hundred other companies to support the declaration that Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are no longer enough for the digital era.

Published in today’s Wall Street Journal, the declaration is led by Segment and the newly launched Platform of Independents, a group of independent software companies united to set a new standard for marketing and business technology. They include Mixpanel, Iterable, Airship, and Radar, among others.

In a recent report, Gartner, a technology research firm, says that “no single CRM vendor is capable of providing the full functionality a business now needs to support a complete customer data stack.” That’s why Kyle Killion, the founder of Suiteness, a hotel booking platform, has been a Segment and Mixpanel customer ever since his company’s launch. He now has at least a dozen tools connected to his Segment account.

“We started with Google Analytics, Mixpanel, and — a while ago — with Kissmetrics. Over the years, we’ve added and removed different providers and settled on the ones that really work for us,” Killion says. For this startup founder, having the flexibility to change the company’s technology stack when necessary, improves speed to market and customer experience. “We used at least four different ESPs (email service providers) before we found the one that has the right combination of features that work for our use case while delivering good customer support.”

For Mixpanel, building software for the open data ecosystem is part of our product vision. Whatever a company’s data stack looks like, Mixpanel will fit into it. “Customers today have more options than ever before,” says Scott Singerman, Global Director of Partnerships at Mixpanel. “To meet or exceed customer expectations, companies must continually innovate to build better products while delivering personalized experiences at scale across all channels. That means companies also need options — and can no longer accept “all-in-one” software solutions. Along with Segment, Mixpanel is committed to building an open ecosystem of flexible, purpose-built solutions for the customer-first era.”

To learn more about the Platform of Independents, join Segment’s webinar hosted by Forrester Principal Analyst, Brandon Purcell.