Oracle CX Unity Connects and Shares Customer Data But Don’t Call It a CDP
When is a CDP not a CDP? When it’s offered by a big marketing cloud vendor, of course. Oracle is the latest to launch an un-CDP, which it calls Oracle CX Unity. Like a you-know-what, it combines customer data from all sources into a unified profile that’s available to other applications. Oracle argues it’s not a CDP because it uses artificial intelligence to recommend customer treatments. Plenty of CDPs do that, although it’s not in the core definition. On the other hand, it’s not clear whether the Oracle product meets the real CDP requirement of creating a persistent data store: they describe CX Unity as connecting data “in context, in motion, and in real time”, which may suggest a virtual view, and their blog post criticizes CDPs as “’data storage’ centric”. But a spokesperson told the Light Reading newsletter that Salesforce’s Customer 360 “does not bring together a unified customer profile” because it “isn’t replicating data, but pulling it from where it resides, leaving data in place and the system where it originated”. This implies that Oracle takes the opposite approach.