Partners: integrate in hours, not weeks

Three months ago, we launched the Segment Developer Center. It gives partners the ability to build their own Segment integrations just by filling out a checklist and writing some code. 

Since launch, we’ve added over 40 new Destinations. Hundreds of Segment customers have enabled these new integrations to supercharge various parts of their business—from customer success to marketing attribution.

Today, we’re excited to announce several new, more powerful capabilities for our partners—allowing you to integrate with Segment in hours, not weeks.

The first are Segment-hosted functions. A consistent point of feedback across early partners was that setting up a new endpoint to accept Segment data could be complex, and that it required new infrastructure and monitoring. 

Today, we’re solving that piece by giving partners the ‘serverless’ ability to upload their code directly to Segment. You bring your existing API and ten lines of code to adapt to it, and we’ll bring the infrastructure to run it. 

The second, we call web plugins. Partners now have the ability to build Javascript packages that Segment can now bundle directly into the browser. If you’ve wanted to collect custom browser information (eg. referrer parsing) or add elements to the UI (e.g. a chatbox), now you can do so by writing 30 lines of Javascript. 

These enhancements are part of our continued investment in providing an extensible platform for our partners. We want it to be easy—and quick—to build and maintain every Segment integration.

As an added bonus, for a limited time, we’re offering hackathons with the Segment Developer Center engineering team for new partners who want to build on us. It’s our mission to make integrating with Segment effortless, and we’re happy to work with you however we can. Learn how to get an invite at the end of this post!

Building with Segment is now 10x easier

Before today, partners only had one means of accepting Segment data—deploy a new endpoint that adheres to our Subscription spec. It meant running, scaling, and monitoring your own servers to accept Segment data.

Now, you have two additional ways to build Segment destinations - by running functions on either AWS Lambda or Segment.

Lambda offers a flexible, totally managed runtime for partners to ingest customer data from Segment. You don’t need to think about scaling servers, and you only pay for what you use.

To use Lambda with Segment, simply create a Lambda subscription, and reference your ARN (Amazon Resource Name). We’ll invoke that function anytime we receive new Segment data.

And we didn’t stop there. For partners who aren’t on AWS, or want to go full ‘serverless’ with their integration, we’ve made this even easier. 

As of today, you can upload your code directly to Segment, hit ‘save’, and have your integration published live in a matter of minutes.

The only work on your side is writing some code to transform Segment data into the format accepted by your API. We’ll take care of the rest.

To show you how powerful this is, here’s what the code for a Segment to Slack integration looks like:

In just 20 lines of Javascript, we’ve built a new integration that Segment will run, scale and manage for us, as it sends all of our events to Slack. 

Web plugins unlock new value

We usually recommend that partners first build server connections because they help our mutual customers remove redundant pixels, SDKs, Javascript libraries, and more from their websites and apps.

Even so, some integrations need a presence in the end users’ device or browser. Maybe they need to change the UI with an A/B test, send a notification, or route to a specific deep link.

That’s why we’ve opened up our tooling to let partners add Javascript code directly on the client. 

Now, partners can write, update, and manage web plugins directly in our Developer Center. We’ll dynamically pull in your integration code and distribute it directly to the hundreds of millions of end users who load Analytics.js every month.

Customers using these integrations can now have a more ‘native’ experience, particularly when it comes to changing the behavior of the application in-browser.

Get the power of customer data in your app

Join dozens of other partners, like Refersion, who are leveraging these new capabilities to power their apps with rich customer data from Segment.

We’re excited about our integration with Segment! Empowering our merchants to automatically enroll new affiliates into their program is a huge advantage for both them and us.

Adrian Maynard, Marketing, Refersion

Here’s a few other companies unlocking great value by building on Segment:

• SlicingDice—All-in-one data warehouse that provides tools to get data from raw to machine learning

  • SlicingDice collects Segment data via their native integration. Already an important player in the Data Warehouse space, Slicing Dice now can run custom analysis across Segment events in real-time, to answer whatever custom queries you might have.

• Auryc—Journey intelligence platform to record users’ digital journeys, CSAT, NPS surveys, and feedback

  • Auryc is one of the first partners to go live as a fully functional web plugin. Their in-browser Javascript automatically records user actions, which can then be used for session recording, heatmapping, and understanding user behavior by playing it back. Inside Auryc you can define your events 

We implemented the Segment/Auryc Integration under the partner built Device Mode Destinations initiative and it is truly a game changer!  The instructions and samples were easy to follow, and the platform team was very helpful and responsive in answering questions. Most importantly, we were able to develop and test the logic independently at our own schedule. The submission, review and approval process was also very fast. Overall we were able to implement and deploy the Auryc integration within a few days.”

Feng Shao, VP Engineering and Co-Founder, Auryc

• Trackier—Leading performance marketing tool that helps you manage campaigns and publisher relations

Introducing Segment to our business is a game changer for us! Being allowed to build and manage our own integration with Segment is wonderful! Highly recommended for those who are looking to build their own Integrations.

Mukul Kaushik, Marketing, Trackier

Quick reminder…

For a limited time, we’re offering personal hackathons with members of our engineering team. We’ll work with you for 45 minutes to walk you through the process of putting your integration live (and hopefully get it working then and there!).

To get an invite, just request access to the Developer Center and then schedule some time with our engineering team through our in-app chatbox. 

If you’re interested in learning more about the Segment Developer Center, check out our webpage or request access today!