MessageGears - Technical Quick Start Guide

Introduction to MessageGears

MessageGears is a unique, data-connected application that allows Marketing teams to deliver personalized marketing experiences leveraging their centralized view of customer information, eliminating the need to replicate and synchronize customer data with a cloud platform.

MessageGears Accelerator is a lightweight Java application with two deployment options: client-managed and MessageGears hosted. The advantages of each option are discussed later in this guide.

MessageGears Marketing Platform

The MessageGears solution is designed to provide marketers with a user-friendly way to deliver sophisticated audience targeting, message personalization, and automations across Email Marketing, Mobile Communications, Text Messaging, Social Platforms, and other partners within your marketing ecosystem. With MessageGears, your team can execute campaigns directly against your internal view of customers and deliver those experiences directly, or through partners like Facebook, Google, and many others.

Customer Data Connectivity

The MessageGears platform is designed to leverage your customer data where it lives. Whether the data is in a cloud-native data warehouse (such as Snowflake, BigQuery, or Redshift), or a more traditional platform (like SQL Server, MySQL, Postgres), the platform is designed to connect to the database directly, query customer attributes to support marketing campaigns, and stream campaign activities and results directly back into your data sources, eliminating data silos and synchronization requirements.

Some data platforms, such as Snowflake, BigQuery, and Redshift, offer "native" connectivity, allowing even more efficient data interactions using cloud buckets for more efficient data loading and unloading (where supported by the underlying data platform).

Helpful links for data connectivity setup:

• Adding Database Connections
• Snowflake Native Connection
• BigQuery Native Connection
• Redshift Native Connection

Once a connection is established, your team can immediately begin building out Audiences and Segments, leveraging our Drag & Drop targeting UI, or writing direct SQL statements using the native functionality available with your chosen database.

Architecture

The MessageGears platform is made up of three core components:

• MessageGears Accelerator - A lightweight application allowing the development of content, campaigns, and automations, connecting directly to your customer data where it resides today.
• MessageGears Cloud - The cloud component of our platform, providing high availability to personalize marketing campaigns at scale and provide analytics and real-time interaction events.
• Your Data Warehouse - Your data warehouse(s) (which remain the system of record for all customer data and attributes), powering campaigns and updated with the latest activity information and data generated by our platform.

MessageGears Reference Architecture

MessageGears Accelerator

Accelerator is the primary user interface for the MessageGears platform, allowing for targeting and segmentation, content creation and QA, campaign creation, scheduling, and automation, as well as at-a-glance campaign reporting and analytics.

The application itself is extremely lightweight and does not house customer or analytics data, except for samples and summaries of campaign performances.

The Accelerator application executes queries against your data platform(s) to collect audience information for a given campaign, as well as offer and other contextual information for the job, and streams those results to our cloud component for message personalization, assembly, and delivery to the end user.

Accelerator can be integrated with an SSO / SAML provider for integrated user access management.

MessageGears Cloud

The MessageGears Cloud component handles message personalization, assembly, delivery, and activity/event tracking. Our cloud component is designed to be highly available, deployed in multiple availability zones and geographic regions. It is highly scalable, leveraging modern horizontal scaling functionality. Finally, it is secure, hosted in a SOCII environment, and when using our Secure PII functionality, stores no personal customer data.

Our Accelerator component handles all interaction between your internal customer data sources and our cloud component, including streaming data outbound from your local environment to the cloud for campaign delivery, and streaming resulting data inbound, back into your local environment into databases and schemas owned by your team.

Transactional messaging APIs directly to our cloud are available for event-driven, real-time message events such as password resets, purchase confirmations, and other messages that require highly available, scalable message delivery in seconds. Additionally, a robust set of event, reporting, and operational APIs are available for more in-depth integrations.

Your Data Warehouse

This is the core component of the MessageGears platform! By connecting directly to one or more of your internal databases, you are able to leverage your customer information directly, securely, and in the most up-to-date version available. Multiple data sources can be utilized for audience targeting, offer and content management, analytics, and many other purposes.

Direct connection allows you to govern what schemas, tables, and attributes the platform can access at a database user level, allowing for extremely granular control over what customer data is available for marketing activities. Most importantly, sensitive data elements (such as credit score, household income, and other elements), can be used for segmentation and targeting, but never leave your own database, eliminating the need to store these elements outside of your own data environment.

Audience queries can be fully customized to improve efficiency and take advantage of features available to your specific database's query language, without needing to synchronize and map elements. Queries can be tuned, results can be cached, and extractions scheduled to allow complete control over interactions with your data environment.

Campaign information, send history, and detailed results are stored back into your internal data platforms, allowing detailed analysis, retargeting, and attribution in a single system, eliminating the need to combine data from multiple siloed solutions.

An Integrated Solution

The combination of MessageGears and a direct connection to your customer data enables your team to leverage the investments you have made in customer data, modeling, and machine learning to empower marketing activities that leverage everything you know about each customer, with as up-to-date view as your team can provide. No waiting for data synchronization, lack of access to data elements, or need to re-engage your engineering teams for each new program.

Representative Customer Ecosystem

Client Managed vs. MessageGears Hosted

As a unique benefit of our hybrid architecture, clients can choose to deploy the MessageGears Accelerator component locally for maximum control and security or utilize a single-tenant solution hosted and managed within the MessageGears cloud. The benefits of each are outlined below:

Client Managed

• Complete control
  • User access governed completely by your team
  • Accelerator requires only outbound access over SSL
• Secure
  • No holes in firewalls and no data replication
  • The application lives alongside your other internal applications, completely within your environment
• Easy to manage
  • Single instance deployment, quarterly optional updates
  • Leverage your choice of cloud provider and all of the related benefits
• Easy to maintain
  • Typical quarterly upgrades take less than 30 minutes

MessageGears Hosted

• Completely managed
  • No need for a local deployment; our team manages all infrastructure components
• Still secure
  • No PII stored with Accelerator
  • Deployed as a single-tenant application within our SOCII environment
  • Lockdown database access to a single instance
• Leverage Your Customer View
  • Still operating off of your internal view of the customer, no data replication
• Affordable
  • Minimal additional hosting fees

Security

MessageGears' system security protocols focus on securing customer provided data and assuring production systems are properly maintained, independently reviewed and access is granted to the least number of people required.

Our client's customer data remains hosted within their internal data sources and our marketing workbench software is installed behind their firewall, fully controlled by our clients and their corporate security procedures and protocols.

For more detail on MessageGears' data security components, including information on our latest SOC 2 Type II report, GDPR/CCPA compliancy and Information Security Policies, please visit our Application and Data Security page once logged-in.

Platform Installation

The MessageGears Accelerator application is designed to be deployed into a modern cloud environment or hosted in a dedicated data center, depending on your company's deployment preferences. Accelerator can be hosted in Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, or on a dedicated Linux server.

With an appropriately provisioned Linux server and optional separate MySQL database, setup and installation take less than an hour! You can find new installation instructions here:

New Accelerator Installation Instructions

Please note that these instructions are for the initial installation only. Version-specific update instructions are available for upgrading an existing Accelerator installation to a newer version.

Help and Support

If you have any questions while reviewing this guide, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager directly, or contact our technical support team at support@messagegears.com.