Treat Metering Like Finance: Building Data Platforms for Consumption Economics

About this episode

Himant Goyal discusses the importance of treating data metering like a financial system to support consumption-based business models.

Summary  In this episode Himant Goyal, Senior Product Manager at Salesforce, talks about how data platform investments enable reliable, accurate metering for consumption-based business models. Himant explains why consumption turns operations into a real-time optimization problem spanning metering, cost attribution, billing, governance, and cross-functional ownership. He explores the richness required in usage data to support sophisticated pricing, the importance of treating metering like a financial system, and the architectural foundations - event schemas, durable ingestion, normalization/validation, a usage ledger, and clear serving layers - needed to power near-real-time visibility with fine-grained drilldowns. He also digs into anti-patterns and reliability concerns such as late or duplicate data, time zone pitfalls, SLAs, and automated policy decisions for pipeline failures. Himant shares practical guidance for capturing usage events from products and logs, balancing push vs. pull and real-time vs. batch processing to manage costs. He highlights configurable metering and rate-card versioning for rapid onboarding of new products, and the cultural shift required for…

People in this episode

Host: Tobias Macey

Guest: Himant Goyal

Topics covered

• data platforms
• consumption economics
• metering
• real-time optimization
• pricing strategies
• data governance

Keywords

• data platform
• metering
• consumption-based models
• real-time data
• pricing
• data governance
• event schemas

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Salesforce, Data Engineering Podcast

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