Parker Conrad wants you to believe that a huge chunk of data analytics belongs inside human capital management systems — a claim that conveniently positions Rippling, which started out as an HR software company, to compete directly with dedicated business intelligence tools.
The pitch is that the modern data stack — the galaxy of tools that companies currently jury-rig from multiple vendors — can be collapsed into one. Just moving data from your various business systems into a warehouse is itself a massive industry; that’s what companies like Fivetran and Airbyte do. Then you need somewhere to store and query it, like Snowflake; then something to transform and clean it, like dbt Labs; and then a visualization layer like Tableau on top.
Conrad’s argument is that Rippling knits together all of that into one system and wraps it in something the others lack: a built-in understanding of your org, its ever-evolving reporting structure, and everything impacted when any metric moves up or down. That’s what Rippling Data Cloud, launching today, is designed to deliver.
To see it in action, Conrad shares his screen from his San Francisco office and then offers a window into what Rippling found when it turned the product on its own workforce.
“There were employees doing things like, ‘Claude is so helpful for me — it analyzes my calendar and my email and puts together a plan for me,’” he says. “That person was spending at a run rate of $30,000 a year for this.”
No one was doing anything wrong, he’s quick to add, …