CDP Institute

Move over, Watson and Einstein. Adobe has introduced its own cutely-named artificial intelligence technology, modestly called Sensei (“master”). Services will include audience targeting, document analysis, and image matching. This is one competition that Oracle has already lost by choosing the utterly pedestrian label of Adaptive Intelligent Apps. What, they couldn’t afford the rights to Leisure Suit Larry?

And what about consumers’ own attitudes towards AI?

Axway today announced AMPLIFY, a new data integration and engagement platform. It exposes separate data sources as API-enabled services. It is also introducing a marketplace of prebuilt services and templates to speed application development drawing on the exposed data. Axway started in 2001 as a rules engine and evolved to focus on API-enabled data integration. Its technology is used by more than 11,000 organizations worldwide. Not a CDP because it doesn’t create a unified, persistent database. But API integration does a partial set of CDP capabilities.

Speaking of data connections, Progress recently announced “the first vendor-agnostic hybrid connector that provides secure firewall-friendly access to back-office data from any cloud, independent of vendor or technology.” I’m pairing this with the Axway item to reinforce that there are, in fact, many data connection options out there. I’m discussing data connections in general to make broader points: all the data you need won’t necessarily be copied into your internal marketing database and data integration needs extend beyond marketing.

Since corporate data management seems to be the topic of the day, let’s finish up with news that the MDM Institute has found a sharp uptick in interest in master data management. Institute president Aaron Zornes said his research found 160,000 members in groups relevant to MDM, RDM (Reference Data Management) and data governance. Although CDPs are often built because corporate MDM projects don’t move quickly enough, the MDM community has plenty of skills that are relevant to CDP issues.

Customer analytics vendor Fospha has purchased customer data platform and journey manager iJento to create unified offering. Both firms are in the portfolio of technology investment firm Blenheim Chalcot, which purchased iJento in March 2016.

Datorama has integrated with LiveRamp IdentityLink for cross-device customer tracking, which will improve the accuracy of Datorama’s campaign targeting and analytics. Datorama qualifies as a CDP but their primary focus is ad performance measurement.

Dataiku has received a $14 million Series A investment to expand its integrated predictive application development platform. The system combines data ingestion, preparation, analysis, visualization, workflow, predictive analytics, collaboration, and deployment. It works on several big data platforms and runs primarily in-house. This is a generic system, not specifically for marketing. But it illustrates the continued maturation of the technologies that underlie CDPs.

Pathmatics announced that Nielsen will be using Pathmatics’ “digital advertising intelligence” data to provide advertisers with more detail about competitive advertising, including new media types, purchase preferences, and targeting of different devices. To be clear, this is information about ad placements, not individual consumer behaviors. But it shows how all parts of marketing are gaining access to more detailed data and, one hopes, making good use of it by becoming more analytical.

Spongecell automatically generates, tests, and optimizes different creative variations for online ads, using customer data for personalization and content selection. By streamlining the personalization process, it makes it easier for marketers to get more value from their customer data. The company has just raised $10.5 million to expand its business.

Here’s another non-marketing use for customer data: in this case, providing intelligent advice to sales people. PROS offers cloud-based solutions to help with product recommendations, pricing, and deal management; it can advise human agents or feed directly into Web sites. And it uses “advanced data science”…but then again, nowadays, who doesn’t?

Well, this is meta: a newsletter item about a press release announcing future publication of the newsletter. I don’t think reading it will cause a tear in the space-time continuum, but then again, it might. Click here if you’re brave enough to find out.