What is the history of the data integration space, and how did Fivetran rise within that market?

The data integration space as a whole kind of came about because of two concurrent trends: one is SaaS fragmentation and the other is cloud data warehousing. 

If you look at the rise of all these SaaS apps over the last several years, what we’ve got now is a lot of different applications solving a lot of specific use cases across the business. That was really great for solving those individual problems, but it’s made it more difficult to gather any cohesive data about everything—instead, your data is kind of spread out across all these different applications. 

On the other hand, you’ve had cloud warehouses taking off, really helping companies process it all—but before Fivetran, the way that data got into the cloud data warehouse was via data engineers who would scrape the APIs that SaaS apps expose in an attempt to centralize that data into that warehouse.

What Fivetran realized was, "Hey, if every company is hiring data engineers to write the exact same code, it would make a lot more sense for us to write it once really well and sell it to every company."

Fivetran beat Airbyte to that by a number of years, and Stitch has been around for a while too. But a few years ago Fivetran really took the lead, and they’ve been the leader in the space for a while now.