CDP Institute

Or maybe those bored DBAs can be redeployed as security managers. A survey from enterprise identity management vendor SailPoint found that that three in five senior IT decision makers expect a data breach in the coming year and one third don’t think they’ll learn about it. A whopping 71% said they’re not equipped to fully protect sensitive data. Maybe it’s just how the survey was written, but no one seemed to feel much urgency about solving the problem.

Data security and privacy are much on users’ minds these days, between GDPR, the Equifax breach, and growing concern over what Google, Facebook, Amazon, and others are up to.

At the other end of the spectrum we have news that Taboola – which offers those little article links at the bottom of Web sites – has teamed with third party data distributors including Oracle Data Cloud, Neustar, Acxiom and Bombora to provide information about Web site visitors. This lets advertisers target the articles using visitor data as well as on-site behaviors. All entirely legal but not exactly putting consumers in control.

Second party data is held more tightly than third party data, in that companies who provide the data can pick exactly who uses it. Consumers still don’t have direct say, though. Salesforce has just announced announced Data Studio, a platform to simplify second party sharing arrangements.

I know what you like and today’s newsletter isn’t it. But I consider these topics important. Let’s start with automated data management – something that should matter to CDP vendors and buyers alike, since it reduces the cost of building and managing a unified, persistent customer database. Datometry, which specializes in this sort of thing, has announced an automated data warehouse schema synthesizer. That makes it easier to move data warehouses to the cloud.

Attribution also generates less interest than it should. C3 Metrics just launched an “attribution data cloud”, which includes user-level viewability, cross-device matching, and fraud removal across online and offline media. Viewability and fraud removal are mainly the concerns of media specialists, but the cross-device matching, universal ID to unify online and offline identities, API access and bidirectional CRM connectors should interest anyone who works with customer data.

Completing our tour of neglect is a report from data security vendor Opus and the Ponemon Institue about data security risks of sharing information with third parties. Attention grabbers: 56% of companies have experienced a third party data breach and 57% don’t have an inventory of third parties receiving their sensitive information. Oh, and the average breach costs $7.3 million to fix.

Neilsen has announced plans to purchase multi-touch acquisition vendor Visual IQ. The deal helps Nielsen measure marketing results based on individual-level data.

Google Cloud had purchased Bitium, which provides enterprise identity management. The deal came one day after SAP Hybris purchased Gigya, which also offers identity services. But Bitium is focused largely on employee identities to control access to resources, while Gigya is focused on consumer identities.

Customer data platforms produce something a lot like a data warehouse, but CDPs are packaged software that delivers the result much more quickly than a conventional data warehouse project. So it’s interesting to see Infoworks announce cloud-based “automated Big Data warehousing” that speeds development and maintenance. Infoworks lacks the focus on customer data unification of a CDP but corporate IT groups might still see it as an alternative. The same technology could also streamline CDP operations.

Drift calls itself a “conversation-driven sales and marketing platform” which sounds like marketing-speak for chatbot. Indeed, that’s their primary product although they add live chat, in-app messaging, and personal Web pages. They’ve served 50,000 users since launching in April 2016 and just raised a $32 million Series B.

Typeform, founded in 2012, calls itself a “conversational data collection platform” and is also a form of chatbot, in this case optimized for data collection by asking one question at a time. This lets marketers replace those dreary multi-question forms that are especially problematic on mobile. They raised a $35 million Series B a couple of weeks ago.