At Fivetran, our mission is to make data access as simple and reliable as electricity. In order to deliver on that mission, we have spent a lot of time and people hours continuing to improve every corner of our product. 

2021 was by far the biggest year we've had at Fivetran — from the acquisition of HVR to the deployment of dozens of new features. Within our product, we deployed 40 new connectors, averaged more than 99.9% pipeline uptime, added 14 new pre-built data models and so much more. 

We are now running over 1 million syncs every day for 50,000 connected sources and 2,000+ customers, which translates to 25 billion data rows. In other words, the data is always flowing with Fivetran, so every one of our customers can rely on our pipelines.

With no further ado, here are our top highlights from 2021. 

1. 40 new connectors

We brought more than three dozen connectors to market this year, increasing our total to over 180. Why do we keep building connections to new data sources? Because you keep asking. We add connectors in response to customer demand, helping you consolidate data from all the sources available to you and drive data analysis for your modern business.  

So whether you are working on marketing analytics, finance analytics, sales analytics or customer success analytics, we’ve got something for you. Here are a few of our most popular new connectors: 

• TikTok connector
  
• Coupa connector 
  
• Sage Intacct connector
  
• Survey Monkey connector
  
• Outreach connector
  
• Oracle RAC connector
  
• Azure MySQL connector
  

While you’re at it, don’t miss this fun TikTok about our TikTok connector. All of these connectors are fully managed — meaning you aren’t waiting for others to build, fix or maintain them. They are ready to go from day one, so your data can be, too. Keep track of our monthly data connector releases here. 

2. Plenty of Fivetran data models

A key part of the ELT journey is that T — the transformation of data. We understand that this is a huge pain point for data teams across the globe and we want to make this experience as flawless as our connectors. To that end, we created 14 new pre-built data models in 2021. Just last week, we launched integrated scheduling, which helps data teams jointly orchestrate Fivetran connectors and transformations using dbt Labs’ open-sourced dbt Core*. Get the latest announcement details about Fivetran Transformations here. 

3. Serious steps in security 

Security is critical to the modern data stack — and for many enterprise customers, data needs to be fully secured both at rest and in transit. That’s why we launched a new plan last year called Fivetran Business Critical, which is designed for businesses that need the highest level of security and data governance. 

Under this plan, you can use our PrivateLink with AWS/Azure, which enables you to avoid the public internet for data with the highest sensitivities. You can use Customer Managed Keys for encryption of data and credentials. In addition to being able to select your cloud provider (GCP, AWS, Azure), you can also select your region. And finally, our BC plan qualifies for PCI DSS Level 1, so you can trust Fivetran to protect customers who process credit card data and cardholder data within e-commerce and in-store transactions.

4. Greater eye on governance and compliance

Providing the best ELT experience isn’t just about ensuring everything is secure and encrypted — it’s also about ensuring that compliance and governance are up to snuff. We’ve spent considerable time and effort to make that a reality, with the same automation and reliability you depend on every day with Fivetran. Here are just a few of our new compliance and governance features:

Advanced role-based access control (RBAC): We added a number of new roles to give you more granular control over which users can load data, from where and to which destinations. The new RBAC roles have been available for new Fivetran users from November 15 and current customers will have the new roles by January 31. To learn more, check out our RBAC documentation. 

Automated user provisioning: You can now provision Fivetran users directly from Okta and AzureAD, including assigning them the right permissions using our RBAC features.

Universal column masking: We’ve extended the column blocking and hashing capability to all Fivetran connectors. This enables you to sync data from sensitive sources, like HR and finance applications, without bringing PII into the data warehouse. Find out more about how column masking works and how to get started in this blog post.

5. Life by a thousand heals

We all love shiny new things — this very list is proof of that — but to really earn your trust, we need to provide more than new features. It’s why we’re so focused on ensuring consistent, reliable service day after day. 

To deliver on that promise, we have more than 250 engineers dedicated to making sure what we’ve already released stays up to the high standards you expect from us. Internally, one of our product managers referred to this as “life by a thousand heals,” as opposed to the “death by a thousand cuts” that you might experience elsewhere in this crazy world we live in. 

Our customers see this play out in real life all the time and when they speak out about it, we know we’ve accomplished our mission.

6.  Extending our extensibility 

While many folks know us for data pipelines that pull data from within a business to power that business’ analytics, we also have Powered by Fivetran – the same pipelines made accessible for product and development teams who need to connect to their customers’ data. This year we made Powered by Fivetran even easier to implement with the Powered by Fivetran Quick Start Guide.

What’s more, we also extended Fivetran into new developer environments by providing integrations into popular open source projects such as Airflow, Terraform, Prefect and Dagster. 

7. Exciting acquisitions and phenomenal funding

We had a big summer. We kicked it off with the acquisition of Teleport Data and followed it up by welcoming the HVR team and announcing $565 million in Series D funding. HVR has long been the industry leader at high volume, real-time replication of massive operational databases for the largest enterprises around the globe. Their expertise and technology, paired with ours, makes us the leader in the enterprise data movement. 

In the coming year, we’ll have a lot more to announce about how we’re integrating the two products. You can be sure that our joint — and future — customer needs will be at the heart of our development here. Learn more about our philosophy for integration from our VP of Product, Fraser Harris, in his post on Fivetran’s plans for 2022 and beyond. 

8. Elevated user experience 

We all know the frustration of having to click five times for a task that should just take one click, or a user interface that just looks outdated and clunky. That’s why we work hard to ensure you can get your work done efficiently and without friction. In the past year, we improved the overall experience of Fivetran in several areas:

• Improved interface for managing your notifications
  
• Ease of finding the right connector 
  
• Simplified process for you to respond to alerts and address problems 
  
• Streamlined approach for finding the right data source
  
• Better interface for managing your database schemas
  

We are constantly improving our products in response to user feedback, user testing and evolving UI/UX best practices. If you’ve got an interface change you’d like to suggest, we welcome your feature requests.  

9. Delivering on documentation 

We get it: documentation is not always considered that sexy, but it is critical for ensuring that you can use our products and connectors as easily as possible. In 2021, we made nearly 2,000 updates to our Fivetran documentation library. We also added 100 FAQ articles based on real questions from our customers, covering databases, destinations and more.

10. Propelled partnerships

Partnerships with other tech companies are critical to ensuring that Fivetran works seamlessly with the products that you already use. That’s why there are over 150 companies in the Fivetran partner ecosystem.

In 2021, new partnerships enabled us to add some exciting new integrations, including Fivetran support for Databricks on the Google Cloud Platform, AWS-specific deployment of Fivetran and the ability to deploy Fivetran within Azure. We now offer multiple integrations with Google Cloud Platform, including the ability to launch Fivetran connectors from within the Google Cloud environment and the ability to discover, purchase and implement the Fivetran data integration solution from within the Google Cloud Marketplace. 

In addition, we are proud that Databricks recognized us for the second year in a row as an exceptional Databricks partner. We also kicked off some awards of our own, with the inaugural Fivetran Partner Awards, which recognize a variety of partners who have added great value to the Fivetran ecosystem. 

But wait, there's more

We didn’t limit ourselves to product enhancements. We also hosted the inaugural Modern Data Stack Conference. With 40+ sessions, 50+ speakers and 20+ sponsors over two days, this conference was filled with visionary keynotes, practical insights and advice on managing data and basically everything data engineers might care about. Speakers included executives from Microsoft, Google, AWS, Databricks, Snowflake and Okta, as well as presentations on the transformative power of data from Chick-fil-A, DonorsChoose, Indochino and Netlify. 

We’re proud of what we’ve delivered in the past year and we’re looking forward to a year of continuing to surprise and delight customers with world-class automation, reliability and security that their entire business can rely on. 

Head to the Fivetran blog for the latest product updates and the best of our insights.