There is a proliferation of technology providers out there. Anybody glancing at a Lumascape can easily be overwhelmed by the multitude of colors and logos. Part of the reason so many providers exist is to address the differing needs of varied departments across a business. Each of those departments’ needs can be satisfied in different ways — and each business is unique when evaluating what’s important to them and what vendors to bring into the fold.

There’s a Lot in a Name

Given that challenge, interoperability across systems is a big concern — especially when it comes to how different vendors talk about a “user.” That problem — which we’ve heard from a lot of customers — led us to develop a new feature for Urban Airship Connect that allows us to talk about a person using many different ways of referring to them. By taking in unique identifiers from the ecosystem, and attaching those to Urban Airship events, we can easily speak the same language. We call it “ID Matching,” and it’s the key to seamlessly using mobile data across a business.

Increasing Audience Intelligence

We’ve long-had the ability to set an external identifier for your push notification users. We call it the [named user]. This allows you to upload lists of people to target, pulled from an external source, as well as easily associate information about that person via our server APIs.

ID Matching, however, is a whole new ballgame. Once you associate an additional ID in our client-side SDKs, every event coming from Urban Airship Connect will be associated with that ID. This is not only useful for our pre-built integrations, it’s also very useful when building directly against the Connect API.

Imagine the Use Cases

Want to integrate with an analytics vendor, and make sure that when we say something, we’re talking about the same person? Associate that ID, and then the integration on top of Connect will make sure that you can see what happened inside the app when we sent a push or in-app notification to that person.

Want to send an SMS to a person? Set the phone number as an additional ID, and then fire off a Twilio API call using AWS Kinesis and Lambda. There are tons of use cases that ID Matching enables, and we’re thrilled that it’s now generally available.

To read more about this feature, check out our release notes.