Data pipeline companies also aren’t complete CDP systems but perform the key task of ingesting data from many sources. Airbyte, an open source platform that offers prebuilt data connectors, just raised a $26 million Series A for that sort of thing. And Jitterbit, a more established data connection company, just bought eBridge Connections, which specializes in e-commerce and B2B integrations.
“Headless CDP” is creeping up the buzz chart. Mostly it refers to CDP systems that build profiles and let external systems provide activation and other user functions. But “headless” could also describe CDP functions built into cloud data management systems like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. For example, Experian has just made its real-time address, email, and phone validation APIs available within the Azure Marketplace. This makes it just a bit easier to build a CDP-like database within Azure.
Databricks loads data into a cross between a data lake and a data warehouse that it, inevitably, calls a “lakehouse”. They’ve just made it easier to build data ingestion pipelines, to build a unified catalog of the ingested data, and to use the data without exporting it. Again, not quite a CDP but the boundaries get blurrier every day.
Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.