You weren’t terribly interested in yesterday’s items about IT tools to build unified databases, Dear Reader. But I’ll double down with news that Google Cloud and Informatica have announced a strategic partnership along the same lines. At least they are familiar company names. Informatica also announced a partnership with analytics data platform Databricks. You’ll recall Informatica bought the Allsight CDP in March.
One of the less-recognized subspecies of Customer Data Platforms are customer success systems, which need unified customer data for their own purposes. The Natero customer success system builds a complete view, although I don’t know whether they meet the RealCDP requirement of making it accessible to other systems. I do know they were just purchased by Freshworks, a unified marketing, sales, and support system that specifically wanted Natero’s data assembly super powers.
MarkLogic also helps technicians build databases, offering a data hub for integration and a NoSQL database for storage. They’ve now added “embedded machine learning” to optimize personalization, customer service, and other things. No claims here to be a CDP.
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.