CDP Institute

But why stop at tracking people when there are so many other Internet-connected things in the world? Glympse lets people (or companies) track locations of connected devices, which could include phones, fitness trackers, cars, packages, delivery trucks, or service people. It recently announced FamilyMap, which lets people share location information within a private group. There’s no mention of using the data for customer tracking or advertising, although the company’s privacy policy leaves open that possibility. With consent, of course.

Sure, we’re biased. But the numbers are mostly from public sources that have no particular ax to grind. We found the 27 CDP vendors had just over $300 million revenue in 2016 and are growing at better than 50% annually, which would lead to $1 billion in revenue for 2019. Download the full report for vendor list, funding, client counts, and other details.

Not willing to take our word that data access is a growing industry? My feelings are hurt but it will pass. Here’s a bit more evidence: marketing automation consultants Sojourn Solutions have just announced an application to extract data from Oracle Eloqua. It “eliminates manual workarounds and tedious exports”, which sure sounds like a good idea. The point being, there’s a widely-felt need to pull data out of operational systems and make it available to other systems. You know, like a CDP does

Still not convinced?  Process this: zeotap extracts data from telecom systems and makes it available for ad targeting. Business is good enough to justify a €12 million Series B. And, the company is expanding to gather data from other industries including security and navigation services. Case closed.

Ascent360, a CDP vendor specializing in retail and recreational clients, announced a $1.9 million seed funding round to support further growth of its business. The company was founded in 2014 and currently has more than 65 clients, mostly small to mid-size businesses.

AppsFlyer captures mobile app events and uses them for attribution and marketing analytics. That’s even more interesting than it sounds because what the company really does it integrate with 2,000 partners including marketing automation, analytics, and retargeting firms as well as media companies. So it’s at integration hub though not a true CDP. The company is growing crazy fast – as in, from 40 to 240 people in the past two years – and just raised a $56 million Series C, bringing total funding to $84.

Is something missing in your life?

Paris-based Eulerian Technologies has raised $5.3 million to accelerate its growth. Eulerian assembles unified customer profiles from on- and off-line sources; provides Web analytics, attribution, and segmentation; and connects with more than 250 partners for analytics, personalization, and execution. In other words, it’s a CDP. The company was founded in 2002 and now has 50 employees at offices in France, Canada, and Spain. It serves more than 130 clients in 35 countries.

Accelerize has upgraded the tracking, attribution, optimization and performance of its CAKE system for advertising analytics. CAKE gathers ad placement and performance data, including capturing and distributing leads. It uses individual-level information for attribution and performance measurement but doesn’t build a database of identified customers. So, not a CDP.

Logtrust bills itself as “the Real-time Big Data-in-Motion as-a-Service firm for Fast Data, Big Data analytics” which won’t win any awards for elegance but does get the point across, I suppose. That point being, it ingests streams of data in real time and allows analysis including visualization, prebuilt queries and event detection. This can obviously be helpful for marketers, although the system isn’t specifically designed to unify customer data from multiple sources. So also not a CDP. The company just raised $11 million.

Just how widespread is this artificial intelligence thing?

Clutch builds an integrated customer database and uses it for customer analytics and personalized marketing. It just bought Persio, a specialist in mobile marketing messages. Price wasn’t announced. Clutch does predictive modeling but doesn’t mention machine learning or artificial intelligence. These days, that’s noteworthy.