Portland’s Urban Airship is probably best known as a push notifications service, but it definitely has designs to go beyond this. Today, the company is launching Urban Airship Connect, a service that helps marketers and data teams ingest data from mobile apps and stream those signals to other business systems.
Urban Airship is partnering with 10 companies to launch the service, which will allow users to connect their mobile data to a total of about 50 business systems. These include CRM tools, e-commerce systems, financial systems and others. This means Urban Airship customers could use this data to email users who just uninstalled an app, for example, or to push mobile campaign data to business intelligence tools for cross-channel attribution.
As Urban Airship president and CEO Brett Caine told me earlier this month, the company decided to put a renewed effort on innovating after he joined the company about a year ago (that’s after Urban Airship founder and CEO Scott Kveton stepped down amid sexual assault allegations against him).
“What we’re announcing today is something that takes what we’ve done in the last five years — delivering innovation around mobile — and taking a step forward by opening up an open omnichannel approach that helps our customers unleash their mobile data,” Caine said. He considers Connect to be the next logical step in the company’s history. “We collect — on our customers behalf — a tremendous amount of data out their customers,” he noted.
Urban Airship wants this new tool to remain very broad. The company considers itself a connector that enables its customers to create the actual user experiences for its internal and external customers — and it doesn’t want to prescribe what its customers can do with the data.
The new service will be available later this year and will also feature connectors to Amazon S3 and Kinesis, Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics. Users who need a custom solution will also be able to use Urban Airship’s APIs and server libraries to build custom integrations.
