Should marketers be in charge of customer data? A study by Econsultancy for SAP suggests the answer is yes: companies doing the best job with their customer data are vastly more likely than others to say marketing owns the customer (66% vs 11%) and manages customer data operations (44% vs 25%). Leaders are better at lots of other things, too. Well worth a look.
IBM is buying open source technology vendor Red Hat in a deal valued around $34 billion. IBM’s announcement crows this “changes everything about the cloud market”. But it also says Red Hat will operate as a separate unit, so it’s not clear how. Probably more relevant: Red Hat is growing and IBM is not.
Lest you conclude the good guys have won, we have the 132-page IAPP-EY Annual Privacy Governance Report on what’s actually happening. Which is that 56% of companies still haven’t complied with GDPR and 19% say they don’t expect to, ever. Just 32% consider their privacy program mature and a minuscule 2% have fully automated response to data subject requests – a GDPR right that would quickly overwhelm manual processes if it widely exercised.
A U.S. district court judge has ruled that Google acted to create illegal monopolies in online advertising technology in a way that blocked competition and allowed higher ad prices to be charged. Google will appeal; meantime, the government will decide what to ask the court to do to remedy the monopoly. Google also faces a new U.K. antitrust lawsuit over its dominance of search.