CDP Institute

Next, CDP Evergage announced a strategic partnership with digital transformation consultancy UST Global. UST Global will help retailers connect Evergage to data sources and take advantage of Evergage’s personalization capabilities.

Finally, predictive analytics company Canopy Labs has been purchased by mobile rewards platform Drop Technologies. Canopy Labs builds a unified customer database and applies AI to create personalized customer journeys. It apparently doesn’t expose its data to external systems, so it’s not really a CDP. But it’s close enough for today’s purposes.

Data and process integration vendor SnapLogic had two announcements yesterday: AI-powered workflows to automate IT integration projects and self-service machine learning. SnapLogic argues that “machine learning is an integration problem” because of all the data preparation and movement involved. It’s an odd perspective but it does illustrate automation of yet another process that once required highly skilled humans.

DataRobot also offers automated machine learning, although they don’t frame it as an integration problem. They did just partner with analytics interface vendor ThoughtSpot, which will make it easier for users to access DataRobot results. ThoughtSpot also made a separate announcement about a voice interface for answering complex questions.

I’m pretty sure that Mojo Vision wasn’t kidding when they announced they have emerged from stealth to offer “invisible computing”, but they certainly seem ripe for ridicule. Saying “the company did not offer any immediate specifics regarding product availability or planned form factors” doesn’t help. The general idea is augmented reality for hands-free data display. They did say they’ve raised more than $50 million dollars, apparently on the reputations of the co-founders.

Cloud-based customer service platform Zendesk has launched Sunshine, an open standards-based CRM platform that could be a serious competitor to Salesforce and Oracle. Sunshine runs on Amazon Web Services, can ingest data from any source, supports custom objects, and supports apps from outside developers. Zendesk says 60,000 custom apps already run on the system. It has further seeded the market with its own sales force automation and data analytics apps.

Further shaking up the sales tech landscape, AdRoll Group has purchased Growlabs, gaining a database with 12 million companies and 320 million business identities plus a collection of lead generation and sales automation tools. Growlabs will join RollWorks, the B2B marketing line that AdRoll launched in February.

Where’s all the money coming from for these new tools? Gartner estimates that technology expanded its share of total marketing budgets to 29% in 2018, up from 22% in 2017. But don’t take this too seriously: the figure was 27% in the 2016 study. With a relatively small sample of “over 600” marketing leaders, the statistical significance of these shifts is doubtful. But the larger truth is clear: marketers spend a lot of money on tech.

Enterprise software vendor SAP has agreed to purchase experience survey company Qualtrics for $8 billion. SAP sees the deal as accelerating a new “experience management” software category “similar to market-making shifts in personal operating systems, smart devices and social networks.” That’s a lot to expect.

Customer experience is not exactly virgin territory. Digital experience vendor Acquia that found 79% of marketers don’t think they make customers feel like individuals and 65% say much of their technology is too complex to create a good customer experience. Yet 86% plan to spend more on martech in 2019 anyway. U.S. consumers are also conflicted: 79% said they’d be more loyal to a brand that showed it really understood them but 78% said brands shouldn’t be able to use their personal data to market different things to them.

Lest you conclude that consumers are entirely irrational, a SurveyMonkey survey found they have a remarkably pragmatic view of why they’d lose trust in a company – placing poor product experience (81%) and poor customer service (78%) far ahead of a security breach (49%) or offensive advertising (46%). Similarly, 76% of U.S. consumers rated resolving problems as the most important element of customer service compared with just 37% who listed “feeling the customer service agent cares about you.”

Improvado consolidates marketing data from more than 100 sources, puts it in a database, and makes it available for analysis. But don’t add them to your list of Customer Data Platforms: they are working with advertising data, not customer-level details. They just announced an integration with the Looker data analysis platform.