CDP Institute

Ok, you can probably think of several things more fun than finding metadata. I hope your list includes sharing data between systems, because Fivetran has a new managed service that makes it even easier to use its library of 150+ connectors. They maintain the connectors for their clients, so changes in source or target systems don’t require any adjustments by client IT staff. Lots of sales, marketing, and advertising systems on their list.

What’s that, you wish you didn’t have to manage any databases at all? Fauna is at your command with a serverless “data API” that lets you read, write, and manipulate data without worrying about the back-end details. Sounds crazy but we live in an age of wonders. They just raised $27 million, bringing their total to just under $60 million.

You may recall from Friday’s newsletter that 95% of CIOs said their organizations have struggled to support remote workers. Our friends at Salesforce have seen the same problem and just invested about $100 million in Tanium, a firm with that helps to manage security for remote workers. They’re also announced a partnership to build a Tanium-based solution within the Salesforce platform.

ID.me also plays in the user security arena, although their specific focus is identity verification, and in particular remote verification of physical IDs such as passports and drivers licenses. They just raised $8.3 million in new funding, bringing their total to $55 million.

While we’re on the topic, let’s note that Estonia-based Veriff, another identity verification platform, has raised $15.5 million, raising its total to $23.8 million. The company can verify identity documents from over 190 countries. Yes, identity verification is hot.

Will work-from-home be more common once the pandemic ends? Should it? Survey results are mixed. ringDNA found 84% of salespeople feel they are equally or more productive selling remotely. But most expected to return to the office regardless: just 22% said there will never be a complete return to in-office working. Download for more on the pandemic’s impact on sales and marketing methods.

A survey by The Manifest was less favorable: just 30% of employees said they were more productive at home while 45% said they got more done in the office. Hints for home-based productivity including having a designated workspace and business hours and taking frequent breaks.

CIOs were even less pleased with remote working: 95% said their organizations had been bogged down by inefficiencies in this Hitachi ID Systems survey. Password lockouts were the most common challenge. That may not be surprising but this is: 52% said on-premise solutions had proven more agile than software-as-a-service or cloud-based solutions.

Enforcement began yesterday for the California Consumer Privacy Act, which makes this a good time to mention that personal data discovery vendor BigID and privacy management platform TrustArc have teamed up simplify compliance with CCPA and other regulations. So I just did.

It’s not entirely accurate to say that customer identification is the opposite of privacy, but it’s entirely wrong, either.

Location is one of the most privacy-sensitive data types, but it’s also one that offers many customer benefits. Bluedot focuses on the advantages by providing real-time alerts that estimate accurately when customers are approaching a business location. Business has been booming during the pandemic as companies seek more efficient curb-side pickup and drive-through purchases. They just raised a $9.1 million Series B, bringing total funding to $20.4 million.

Lytics has launched Lytics View, a quick-start process that generates AI-based offer and product recommendations in as little as one week. Data is fed into the system by Lytics’ own Web site tag, avoiding the delays of conventional data integration. Of course, you’ll probably want to add other sources eventually and there’s still that pesky need to connect with customer-facing systems to deliver the recommendations.