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, then a visualization layer like Tableau on top.
