Customer data platforms are packaged software that combine Customer data from multiple sources into unified profiles that can be shared with other systems. They’re a billion dollar industry, but have been relatively unknown outside of marketing technology circles. One reason is that the big enterprise software vendors have not offered CDP products of their own.
Those days are now officially over. Salesforce this week announced it is expanding its CDP product, Customer 360, to include a persistent database. That’s a big change because the original version of Customer 360 assembled customer data from source systems but did not store the results.
Salesforce thus joins Oracle CX Unity (announced October 2018) and Adobe Experience Cloud Profiles (announced March 2018) in accepting persistent profiles as a core CDP requirement. All three are late to the game: persistent data has long been the standard among specialist CDP systems. It is one of the five essential features identified in the CDP Institute’s RealCDP certification program, a vendor-neutral project that aims to clarify which products truly deliver on CDP user expectations.
The CDP industry is already thriving without participation by the marketing cloud vendors. It will have to survive a bit longer without their help, since none of their CDP products are yet in general release.
But there’s no question that the cloud vendors’ entry will be a gain – if only because they’ll now stop disparaging the concept, something they did frequently before they had their own products to offer. More important, the cloud vendors will draw attention to CDPs outside of CDPs’ current base in marketing departments.
The expanded exposure for CDPs comes at a good time. Nearly every large company has some type of digital transformation project under way and most of those projects require unified customer data. IT departments have been looking at other solutions to house that data, including CRM, data warehouses and data lakes.
Each of these has limitations: CRM systems are designed to capture customer interactions within the system not store data from other systems. Data warehouses are highly structured and struggle to keep pace with changes inputs. Data lakes can ingest almost anything but don’t give non-technical users easy access to unified customer profiles.
By contrast, CDPs are optimized to create and share customer profiles. They are specifically designed to ingest all sources with minimum technical effort, to retain full details of all ingested data, assemble the data into unified profiles, and to present those profiles through end-user interfaces, API connections, and formatted file extracts.
Some CDP vendors have proprietary technology but most use standard connectors, data stores, and other components. Their advantages come from preassembling these components to reduce time, cost, and risk compared with custom development.
CDPs can also fit well with technologies already in place. They often read data from existing warehouses, data lakes, and integration platforms instead of gathering it directly from source systems.
