Data gravity is the pull a product gains when a customer's shared record lives inside it and new products, teams or uses read and write that same record instead of a copy. Every new use starts with the data already in place, which makes the product the natural home for the next one and hard to leave.
Also calledsingle source of truthsystem of record
How Data Gravity works
Each new use starts with data already in place, so adding it costs less than starting elsewhere, and every use leaves the record more complete. Workday launched Financials in July 2007 on the same foundation as its HR product; Yale added Financials in 2017 on the HR data it had kept there since 2015. Procore grew from four products in 2017 to 13 in 2020, all on one project record running from bid to payment. Leaving either company means moving the whole record.
HR records in WorkdayPeople and approval data on one foundation
Financials on that foundationLaunched July 2007
Yale adds financeIn 2017, on its 2015 HR data
One record, many usesFinance reads the people and approvals HR keeps
How Workday extended one shared record from HR into finance, so a new product started with the customer's data already there.
How companies won with Data Gravity
From the win chains in Strategy Canon case studies: what the winner did, and what its rival did at the same step.
vs. Cylance
CrowdStrike
Every endpoint's activity in one cloud graph
What it did
Threat Graph held all customers' telemetry; 'step one was to get data', unlike prevention-first rivals (Kurtz)
Cylance
Detection and response added May 2017 as CylanceOPTICS, which kept data on the endpoint 'without requiring cloud connectivity'
Four products (2017) to 13 (2020); Honest Buildings financials (2019), Levelset lien management for $500M (2021), Procore Pay from invoice to payment (2023)
PlanGrid
Stayed a drawings and field tool; 'hit a wall in terms of TAM in SMB and midmarket' against enterprise-ready rivals (Young, 2023)