The Customer Data Platform industry continued its strong growth in 2018, adding 29 vendors, 2,600 employees, and $173 million in funding. These figures, contained in the CDP Institute’s latest Industry Update, show acceleration compared with 2017, when the industry added 26 firms and 2,200 employees.

The report lists 78 companies identified as CDP vendors by the CDP Institute, along with funding, employee count, product type, region, and year founded for each vendor. Total vendors increased by 60% and employment increased by 65% in 2018 while funding rose by 23%.

Other notable findings in the report include:

• industry revenue reached $740 million, up more than 50% from the previous year. Revenue for 2019 is likely to exceed $1 billion.

• an increasing number of vendors offer products that were originally developed as CDPs, rather than older products that have been repositioned as CDPs after starting as something else. The next-generation products are often specialized by industry, region, or client size.

• CDPs with analysis and campaign functions expanded their share of the industry during 2018, while systems limited to data access declined. This reflects many buyers’ desire to meet their needs with as few systems as possible.

• fragmentation is rising, as the industry share of the top five vendors dropped from 31% to 28%. This also reflects the growth of small, specialized vendors that may be able to dominate limited market niches for a long time.

• 2018 saw the first two major CDP acquisitions by enterprise systems companies: Datorama by Salesforce and Treasure Data by ARM Holdings. Additional acquisitions are likely to follow as buyers increasingly demand CDP capabilities from enterprise software vendors.

“The need for unified, accessible customer data continues to increase throughout business organizations,” said CDP Institute CEO David Raab. “The expansion of the CDP industry offers new options for buyers to purchase systems with exactly the set of features they need, often from vendors who are experts in their particular industry.”

Download the report here.

About the Customer Data Platform Institute

The Customer Data Platform Institute educates marketers and technologists about customer data management. The Institute publishes industry news and educational materials, provides vendor comparison reports, builds directories of industry vendors and service firms, and offers Webinars, workshops, and consulting on related issues.

Customer Data Platforms are defined as “packaged software that maintains a unified, persistent customer database which is accessible to external systems.” They are the only packaged software specifically designed to create and share a complete view of each customer. CDP Institute Founder and CEO David Raab named the Customer Data Platform category in 2013.