An external API is a good start! API are best suited for real-time operational integrations; however, for most analytical needs, APIs don't solve the whole problem. Your customers still need to build the other half of the data pipeline: API connectors, ETL pipelines, and other scripts to extract the data from your API and load the data into their data warehouse. This is expensive and time-consuming.
Alternatively, your application could make the data directly available in the customer's data warehouse, saving them the integration hassle and offering a lucrative opportunity for your company.
For more information on this opportunity, check out our blog post here.
"Export to CSV" is a common solution for your customers to quickly export structured data from your software application. However, it quickly reaches limits when:
In these situations, you are better off going with direct data access, and Amplify can help!
Most of our customers actually use Amplify alongside their in-app reporting/analytics capabilities. While in-app analytics are useful for business users to quickly look at metrics or trends, when users want to run custom analytics or use the data for other initiatives, the data needs to be available outside of the software application and instead needs to be in the user's analytical environment.
In-app reporting serves your application users and direct data access with Amplify helps serve everyone else.
Typically the burden of procuring, paying for, implementing, and maintaining these integration tools falls on your customers. In our experience, your customers would much rather get the data directly from their software vendors rather than needing a third-party integration tool to extract the data. Amplify lets you offer direct data access to your customers - they get a better experience working directly with you, and you reap the value that's rightfully yours.
You could - each cloud provider and tool has technologies available to enable this. However, in our experience, scalable, cross-cloud data integrations are deceptively complex to build, let alone maintain and support. We built the world's best data access experience, so you don't have to. Instead of recreating the wheel, you could embed Amplify to accelerate the launch of your zero-ETL features to a matter of a few days, instead of your engineering team spending months building.
Your customers will typically benefit from direct data access if:
If your customers are mainly individuals or small businesses, they might not benefit as much.
For most customers, the only technical effort needed is during the initial one-time connection to the source data, which includes creating read-only credentials. This typically takes under 30 minutes, and we will be with you every step of the way.
Any custom integration with your application or authentication system can typically be completed in 1-2 weeks.
Yes! Amplify is fully-hosted and ready for use without a dedicated software engineering team.