Real-time marketing activation with Softcrylic on AWS for Brightline

During the initial audit of Brightline’s Adobe stack, Softcrylic uncovered several barriers that were limiting performance. Brightline’s customer profiles were collapsing due to redundant data feeds, misconfigured AEP customer segments, and in some cases obsolete data, which hindered the company’s efforts to properly segment riders or deliver personalized experiences. Excessive data ingestion also pushed Brightline toward costly Adobe licensing overages, raising financial concerns alongside operational inefficiencies. Beyond the technology itself, Brightline faced other organizational challenges too.

The marketing team’s previous vendors were underprepared to make the most out of Adobe’s tools, such as Real-Time Customer Data Platform (CDP), Journey Optimizer, and Customer Journey Analytics. At the same time, the company’s performance metrics were misaligned with business impact. Success had traditionally been measured by volume of email sends rather than outcomes, such as delivery, open rates, click-throughs, conversions, and revenue. To grow ridership and improve ROI, Brightline needed a fundamental resetting of its data foundation and performance measurement approach.

Softcrylic addressed these issues through two parallel workstreams. The first focused on an immediate, short-term remediation of Brightline’s existing AEP instance. After conducting a detailed audit of schemas, datasets, audiences, and journeys, Softcrylic reconfigured the environment to deliver some early wins. Working closely alongside AWS Partner Adobe, the team accelerated the rollout of Identity Graph Linking Rules, a beta program that resolved critical profile collapse issues. Using this program, Brightline could activate more usable journeys, demonstrating early value.

The second workstream laid the foundation for long-term success. Softcrylic proposed and began building an MDF to give Brightline full control over its customer data. The MDF was designed around a scalable data lakehouse architecture within AWS, structured in bronze, silver, and gold layers. Using it, Brightline could refactor and clean its rider, loyalty, account, and behavioral data into a single, user-centric, unified view. By using a customer identity graph in Amazon Neptune—a serverless graph database—constructed by Softcrylic, Brightline achieved full ownership of its data, taxonomies, and segments, which resulted in cleaner integrations with AEP while reducing the volume and cost of data ingested.

At the heart of Brightline’s solution was a connected ecosystem of technologies. The AEP provided the core foundation, which included its Real-Time CDP, Journey Optimizer, and Customer Journey Analytics. Meanwhile, Brightline used AWS and Databricks to host key user, account, customer, and ridership data. With this foundation in place, the company was positioned to unlock far greater control and insights over its customer data. By combining Adobe’s marketing tools with its existing cloud infrastructure, Brightline gained the flexibility to activate campaigns more efficiently and measure their impact across channels, setting the stage for measurable improvements in engagement and revenue.

Brightline gained significant business value through its modernization effort with Softcrylic. By reducing data bloat and profile collapse, the company gained a cleaner and more cost-efficient environment that avoided Real-Time CDP overages. With the creation of an owned and unified customer profile graph, Brightline achieved robust and accurate segmentation, improved personalization, and more effective campaign optimization. Near real-time activation capabilities meant that Brightline could tailor communications more precisely, beginning with email and laying the groundwork for future expansion into SMS, paid media, and onsite personalization. Aggregated profile metrics provided intuitive, efficient means for marketers’ segmentation, while the MDF streamlines AEP data ingestion. As a result, Brightline has realized a 92 percent reduction in event datasets ingested into AEP, improving system performance and lowering costs.

The project shifted Brightline’s performance mindset—instead of focusing on the volume of emails sent, the team began measuring meaningful engagement outcomes such as delivery rates, open rates, click-throughs, conversions, and ultimately revenue attribution. This meant that marketing activities could be directly tied to ridership growth and customer loyalty.

Brightline also benefited financially through Softcrylic’s flexible contracting approach. By structuring the MDF engagement through AWS Marketplace Private Offers—a purchasing program that lets sellers and buyers negotiate customer prices and end-user licensing agreement terms—Brightline could use existing AWS credits and earn new ones. Brightline also gained access to discounted pricing for the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (AWS MAP) to accelerate its cloud migration and modernization journey. This not only reduced upfront costs but also deepened Brightline’s investment in AWS, strengthening its broader infrastructure strategy.

Brightline appreciates Softcrylic’s subject matter expertise, transparency, and delivery model. Because the Partner can diagnose and resolve technical issues while simultaneously designing a long-term foundation, Brightline can see immediate results without losing sight of strategic goals: advanced attribution, multichannel activation, and innovative use cases, such as clustering algorithms and generative AI for audience discovery. With a scalable, AWS-powered data foundation in place, Brightline has transformed from a company measuring success by email volume to one driven by real business outcomes—setting the stage for deeper personalization, smarter audience discovery, and continued ridership growth across every channel.