CDP Institute

CDP vendor Lytics has announced the open beta of a new tool, Cloud Connect, that will let the Lytics personalization engine run SQL queries to extract data from cloud data warehouses such as Google Cloud Platform and Snowflake.  The results will be merged with real-time data streams within the personalization engine, formerly the Lytics CDP but now called Lytics Decision Engine.   Note that there’s still a unified, persistent customer database in the picture.

CDP Blueshift is expanding sales efforts in the European and Asia Pacific regions, announcing plans to open London and Singapore offices and an option to host data in Europe.  The company raised a $30 million Series C in February and is eager to grow its global footprint.

I know you love Gartner reports, Dear Reader, so here’s a fairly modest one about the role of marketing in digital transformation.  The most interesting news is that 80% of CMOs leaders think they’re responsible for leading digital business transformation strategies, a figure that most non-marketing leaders would probably find delusional.   More realistically, 83% say that innovation programs have not met management expectations.

Does the term “no-code” set your heart aflutter?  If so, be sure to sit down before reading that no-code data visualization and dashboarding platform Preset has raised a $35.9 million Series B, bringing total funding to $48.4 million.  Less evolved users can still write SQL queries if they wish.  Preset is a managed service on top of Apache Superset, which some readers will find even more exciting than no-code.

Since we’ve already started down the data geek rabbit hole, here’s news that data quality vendor Monte Carlo has raised a $60 million Series C, bringing their total to $101 million.  Monte Carlo’s super power is making it easier for data engineers and analysts to monitor the quality of data as it moves through company pipelines.  That’s called “data observability” and quite a few companies do it.

I wish I had one more data story but we’ll have to settle for learning that out of home ad marketplace AdQuick has partnered with Catalina to target and measure OOH ads based on Catalina’s individual-level purchase data.  It’s a major step beyond the usual OOH measurements based on broad demographics and foot traffic.  While targeting will be based on historic information, the purchase information will be updated in real time.