CDP Institute

Marketing automation platform Selligent has been purchased by CM Group, which owns other email companies including Sailthru, Campaign Monitor, Emma, and Delivra. The deal adds AI capabilities to the CM Group portfolio and will enable Selligent to expand mobile messaging, analytics, and real-time personalization. Selligent was owned by private equity firm HGGC, which bought it in 2015.

Email is apparently a hot investment right now. Email creation platform Stensul just raised a $16 million Series B, bringing total funding to $23 million. It seems odd that there’s a market for a stand-alone email builder, but, apparently, there are enough enterprise marketers wanting a best-of-breed solution to keep Stensul growing.

Two major trends in the CDP industry have been emergence of industry specialists and of CDPs built into operational platforms. Right on cue, ticketing platform TicketIQ has launched FanIQ, which creates unified customer profiles and markets against them. Whether it’s a CDP depends on whether other systems can also access its data. FanIQ also taps into TicketIQ’s 40 million user profiles, matching yet another trend: integration of third party prospect lists.

Speaking of trends, what could be trendier than privacy-safe customer identities? Data collaboration company Karlsgate has introduced Karlsgate Data Exchange, which employs “encrypted, single-use pseudonymized tokens” (okay, those last two are redundant) to match data sets without sending personal identifiers to a trusted third party. The approach is trendily named “Cryptoidentity” but, mercifully, doesn’t seem to involve Bitcoin-style cryptocurrencies.

Here’s what’s trendier than privacy-safe customer data: AI-driven, location-based privacy-safe customer data! simMachines has it covered with personifyAI, which takes a brand’s location-based customer data and uses explainable AI to assign customers to meaningful audience segments. AND they have lower-case company and product names. It’s beyond trendy: it’s trend-tastic!

CDP ActionIQ has launched its next-generation data engine, modestly named InfiniteCompute. It promises near-instant adjustment to workloads from multiple users, delivering responses in minutes at any scale. Unneeded resources are released when workloads are lower, avoiding unnecessary expense.

CDPs like ActionIQ share some turf with general purpose business intelligence engines. Glancing into that neighborhood, we see that Qlik just bought Blendr.io, an integration platform that will ease connections with 500+ of SaaS applications and cloud-based data sources. Also, TIBCO bought ibi, formerly Information Builders, Inc., which has offered a low-code development platform since the 1970s – well before low-code was cool. If you don’t know what a 4GL is, ask your grandmother.

Dentsu’s Merkle group also had its origins in the 1970’s. They just signed a deal for Adobe to integrate Merkle’s Merkury identity resolution platform. It’s another move to strengthen first party data capabilities as third party data becomes harder to find.