TechEdge AI Interview with Manish Sood, CEO, Founder and Chairman of Reltio

As the founder and CEO of Reltio, what inspired your vision to create the first cloud-native master data management platform? How did you foresee and prepare for this need in the market?

I launched Reltio in 2011 to help organizations accelerate the value of their data and deliver on business outcomes I saw a growing need for enterprises to treat their core data as an interoperable and reusable asset and the way we wanted to solve it was by providing data unification capabilities that operated at scale, in the cloud, as a SaaS offering, delivering outcomes in real-time, in milliseconds, not minutes, hours or days that the market was used to. Since Reltio’s inception, the company has evolved from the concept stage to a high-growth company with over $100 million in annual recurring revenue.

Today, Reltio, our AI-powered data unification and management capabilities–encompassing Entity Resolution, multidomain MDM, and Data Products–deliver trusted data in real-time with security, scalability, and agility. I have architected some of the largest and most widely implemented data management solutions most Fortune 500 companies use today.

Drawing from your prior experience at Informatica and Siperian, what core lessons did you learn about enterprise data management needs and gaps? How did those insights directly shape your approach to building a more innovative data platform with Reltio?

In 2010, I worked for Siperian, which was acquired by Informatica. At the time, Informatica was not focused on the opportunities that I strongly believed were ideal for a new approach to data management and unification. Three primary secular trends were driving the need for a new data unification and management approach: the proliferation of siloed enterprise applications, the ongoing digital revolution, and cloud migration. I launched Reltio because I believed there was a better solution for delivering unified, trusted data to business users who rely on information to run their operations and make decisions.

What makes Reltio stand out from other players in the data management space? Can you point out some flagship capabilities that drive faster time-to-value for customers compared to alternatives they may be considering?

Reltio offers AI-powered data unification and management capabilities that deliver trusted, interoperable core data across the enterprise with unmatched business responsiveness, enabling businesses to increase efficiency, manage risk, and drive growth.

Reltio offers unmatched business responsiveness with:

• Real-time Interoperable Data
• Highly Flexible Architecture
• Fast Time to Value
• AI-Driven Innovation

Reltio Connected Data Platform is a data unification and management cloud. It unifies, standardizes, and enriches data from disparate sources into secure, trusted, interoperable data. Our platform mobilizes the trusted data to be available where it is needed and when it is needed—in milliseconds. Our core capabilities for Data Unification include Entity Resolution, multi-domain MDM, Data Products powered by the underlying Connected Data Graph, and AI. And we tap into the power of generative AI and large language models.

As a high-growth SaaS company, Reltio has earned industry recognition, including your Owler ranking among top CEOs. When scaling an organization so rapidly, what are some leadership challenges posed? How do you focus the team to power through despite market uncertainty or competition?

When scaling a high-growth SaaS company rapidly, leadership faces many challenges that test the organization's resilience and adaptability. Maintaining the company culture becomes increasingly challenging as the organization expands, necessitating leaders to put concerted efforts into ensuring that new hires not only assimilate the core values but also contribute positively to the culture. Talent management emerges as a significant hurdle, with the dual challenge of attracting and retaining the right talent by aligning their development with the company's trajectory.

Furthermore, as the pace of growth accelerates, ensuring that all team members remain aligned with the company’s vision and strategic goals becomes a formidable task. These challenges demand leaders to be more intentional in their communications, decision-making, and fostering an environment that supports continuous learning and adaptation to sustain the organization's momentum and integrity during rapid scaling.

To focus the team during market uncertainty or competition: To navigate market uncertainty or intense competition, focusing the team on delivering business value and faster time-to-value for customers becomes paramount. This approach ensures that the team prioritizes initiatives that enhance customer satisfaction and impact, while solidifying our place as a valuable partner to them. Our solutions unlock growth, achieve efficiencies and help improve fraud detection and risk management, which are all crucial for our customers who are also trying to navigate challenging times. We have to ensure that we consistently highlight how we bring these to bear for our customers.

Simultaneously, continuing to innovate and moving quickly are essential to stay ahead of competitors and meet evolving market demands. For example,  within the last year, Reltio released several innovative products and features, notably three new AI-powered capabilities that enhance customer data analysis and increase stewardship productivity by up to 10x. These include Generative AI-driven search and data visualizations for streamlined analysis using a conversational interface, machine learning enhancements to boost data steward efficiency, and predictive propensity models to identify customer segments and improve customer acquisition and retention.  

A relentless focus on execution ensures that the team not only ideates but also delivers on these innovations effectively. Moreover, emphasizing and continuously refining our unique value proposition to the marketplace ensures that the team understands what sets the company apart and communicates this difference clearly and compellingly to customers. The team can remain focused and motivated by adhering to these principles, driving forward despite any external pressures or challenges.

Reltio supports versatile use cases - what's the secret sauce behind your platform architecture that allows tailored solutions across customer 360, catalog/product data, supplier data, and more? How do you balance customization with speed and ease of use?

Due to its highly scalable, real-time core principle, Reltio's platform architecture is designed to support a wide range of use cases, from customer 360 to catalog/product data and supplier data management. This foundational aspect ensures businesses can empower their operations with trusted, interoperable data accessible anytime and anywhere. As a cloud-native SaaS solution, Reltio leverages the robust, flexible infrastructure provided by major public cloud services like AWS, GCP, and Azure. This strategic choice allows Reltio to benefit from the billions of dollars in innovation and infrastructure advancements these cloud providers make, ensuring that the platform remains at the cutting edge of scalability and reliability. The cloud-native approach facilitates seamless data management across diverse domains and ensures that the solution can dynamically scale to meet the ever-changing demands of businesses.

In balancing customization with speed and ease of use, Reltio incorporates AI as a critical enabler. AI technologies enhance the speed and accuracy of data unification processes, making it easier for users to integrate and manage their data across various sources and formats. This integration of AI streamlines data unification and significantly reduces the time and effort required for data cleansing and preparation, allowing businesses to derive actionable insights from their data quickly. The combination of a cloud-native architecture and AI-driven functionalities ensures that Reltio's platform can offer tailored solutions that are both powerful and easy to use. By doing so, Reltio addresses the critical need for businesses to access a flexible yet efficient data unification and management solution that does not compromise performance or scalability, enabling them to stay ahead in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.

The Salesforce collaboration enables mutual access to complementary data sets. What inspired this integration, and why is that a vital synergy to solve for customers? What added value does this joint offering ultimately drive?

The integration between Reltio and Salesforce was inspired by a shared vision to enhance customer experience and operational efficiency through trusted core data. As a leader in enterprise software for customer experience, Reltio, with its capability to fuel Salesforce products with unified data encompassing customer, product, assets, locations, and more, creates a powerful synergy. This collaboration allows mutual access to complementary data sets, addressing the critical need for companies to access reliable and comprehensive data to drive their decision-making processes. Combining Reltio's strength in creating a unified data foundation with Salesforce's expertise in customer experience, the powerful combination delivers vertical solutions tailored to specific market segments. This integration deepens the understanding of business and data needs across various industries but also significantly enhances the value delivered to customers by enabling more personalized and efficient customer interactions, ultimately driving superior business outcomes.

What are the future product roadmap and expansion plans for Reltio following this initial integration success? Where are the most significant greenfield opportunities to continue disrupting the data management landscape?

Following the success of the Salesforce integration, Reltio's future product roadmap and expansion plans are set to disrupt the data unification and management landscape further. We plan to expand the breadth of our data unification,  including Entity Resolution, multi-domain Master Data Management (MDM), and Data Products, including AI-powered insights to drive action. These offerings are enriched with AI-powered insights to drive actionable intelligence, positioning AI as a pivotal enabler for enhancing speed and accuracy in creating trusted, interoperable data. This includes capabilities for real-time data quality, reference data management, and metadata management. Furthermore, Reltio plans to strengthen its role as an enabler of AI initiatives, ensuring that trusted data is readily available to data science and AI teams. This is facilitated through seamless integrations with data-driven applications like Salesforce and data warehouses such as Snowflake, Databricks, and others. The most significant greenfield opportunities lie in harnessing these integrations and AI capabilities to meet the evolving data management needs across industries, further solidifying Reltio's position as a leader in data unification and management.

From your lens of analyzing broader technology trends, what emerging opportunities excite you the most in data and AI? As Reltio looks ahead in 3-5 years, what foundational innovation investments are you prioritizing to stay ahead of customer needs?

From the perspective of broader technology trends, the evolution of AI and the rapid adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) stand out as particularly exciting opportunities in the realm of data and AI. These advancements promise to significantly improve the accuracy of entity resolution, enabling deeper and more nuanced understanding of data relationships. Additionally, the development of more intelligent conversational interfaces, powered by the latest AI breakthroughs, is set to revolutionize how we interact with data systems, making them more accessible and intuitive. The ongoing evolution of cloud technologies, aimed at delivering higher resilience and lower latency, further supports these advancements by providing the necessary infrastructure for robust, scalable AI applications. Moreover, the fusing of analytical and operational data planes through Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing (HTAP) represents a major shift towards real-time, actionable insights, blurring the lines between data analysis and operational decision-making. As Reltio looks ahead in the next 3-5 years, prioritizing foundational innovation investments in these areas—LLMs for improved data quality, advanced conversational interfaces, resilient cloud infrastructure, and HTAP—will be crucial to staying ahead of customer needs and continuing to lead in the data management and AI spaces.