How it works is this: Hull has connectors for major customer-facing SaaS systems, such as Salesforce, Optimizely, HubSpot, Mailchimp, Facebook custom audiences, Slack, and Zendesk. Users connect with those systems and specify data elements or lists to synchronize. When data changes in one of customer-facing products, the change is sent to Hull which in turn sends it to other products that are tracking that data.

But, unlike data exchanges such as Zapier or Segment, Hull also keeps its own copy of the data. That’s the “persistent” bit of the CDP definition. It gives Hull a place to store data from enhancement vendors including Datanyze and Clearbit, from external processes called through Javascript, and from user-defined custom variables and summary properties, such as days since last visit. Those can be used along with other data to create triggers and define segments within Hull.  The segments can then be sent to other systems and updated as they change.

In other words, even though the external systems are not directly reading the data stored within Hull, they can still all work with consistent versions of the data.