Fivetran adds reverse ETL with acquisition of Census

Complementary capabilities

Since it was founded in 2012, Fivetran has grown quickly. To date, it has raised more than $850 million in funding, including $565 million in a single round in 2021 and another $125 million in 2023.

Using the funding, the vendor has added capabilities including automated data transformation through an integration with DBT Labs, a private deployment option and a series of connectors that enable customers to ingest high volumes of data without losing performance.

In addition, Fivetran made two other acquisitions, buying HVR in 2021 to add change data capture and Teleport Data the same year to introduce data replication.

But until the acquisition of Census, Fivetran customers could not port their integrated data out to the applications where employees do their work without going through the time-consuming task of configuring a pipeline or the expense of adding tools from another vendor.

Adding reverse ETL is important because it eliminates that need to develop or buy capabilities beyond Fivetran's offering, according to Ni.

"Reverse ETL allows users to take the unified, cleansed data that Fivetran has loaded into a cloud warehouse like Snowflake and push it -- contextually -- into operational applications where business actions happen," he said. "This makes the data not just analytical, but actionable."

Beyond providing additive capabilities, the acquisition of Census makes sense for Fivetran because the two vendors share a similar developer-friendly stack that caters to users of Snowflake and DBT Labs, among others, Ni continued.

Kevin Petrie, an analyst at BARC U.S., similarly noted the importance of adding Census' reverse ETL capabilities because of how they complement Fivetran's platform.

In addition, with Census specializing in sending customer data back to work applications and Fivetran targeting data integration from databases and SaaS applications, the combination will help Fivetran compete with other data integration vendors.

"Reverse ETL is a nice complement, giving Fivetran users the ability to synchronize data [in both directions] across SaaS applications and data warehouses," Petrie said. "This also helps differentiate Fivetran against its data pipeline competitors."

Following its acquisition of Census, while differentiated from some competitors, Fivetran is not the lone data integration vendor to provide reverse ETL capabilities. Informatica enables reverse ETL. So do Boomi and Qlik through its acquisition of Talend, among others.

But whether unique among data integration vendors or not, Fivetran's acquisition of Census to add reverse ETL is valuable for the vendor's customers. Customer feedback, in fact, was a motivator for the move, according to Fivetran chief operating officer Taylor Brown.

"Our customers have been asking for this for a long time," he said, noting that more than 200 Fivetran users already use Census as well. "We've had dozens of internal requests logged around reverse ETL. Instead of building from scratch, we saw an opportunity to move faster by bringing in a team that's been laser-focused on solving this problem for years."

Now, Fivetran's product development focus is to fully integrate Census into Fivetran so users -- especially those developing AI tools that require high-quality data in real time -- can manage both importing and exporting data in one place, Brown continued.

Focusing on capabilities that enable AI development is wise, according to Petrie. However, toward that end, the vendor, which focuses largely on ingesting and integrating structured data, should add capabilities that enable users to prepare unstructured data as well, Petrie said.

Inherent risk

Although the acquisition of Census seemingly provides capabilities that complement what Fivetran already provides, no acquisition is without risk, according to Petrie.

Fivetran did not disclose what it paid to acquire Census, so there's no way of knowing whether Fivetran potentially overextended itself financially. But even beyond financial risk, there is the risk that the integration won't go well.

Sometimes, technologies are difficult to piece together and take more time and money to integrate than anticipated. Sometimes companies have vastly different corporate cultures, and the employees prove to be a poor fit.

"Any acquisition is disruptive and poses integration challenges in terms of product portfolio, sales organizations and culture," Petrie said. "This acquisition should be less disruptive than others because Census is relatively small."

One potential challenge is that Fivetran primarily serves data engineers, database administrators and analysts while Census serves marketing, sales and customer service managers, he continued.

"As a combined company, Fivetran will need to bridge these worlds and cross-sell their products," Petrie said.

Ni likewise noted that all acquisitions have inherent risks that could sabotage their success. On the surface, however, Fivetran and Census make sense together, according to Ni.

"There's always integration risk and executive distraction, but this is a pretty clean deal," Ni said.

Eric Avidon is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget and a journalist with more than 25 years of experience. He covers analytics and data management.