CDP Institute

Let’s stick with funding news because why not? Cogito has raised a $37 million Series C for its system that listens to sales and service agents and makes suggestions for what they should say during phone calls. The round brings total funding to $64.5 million.

A petty consistency may be the hobgoblin of small minds but I’ll give you a third funding item regardless. Points, which uses AI to assign credit risk to people without bank accounts, has raised $8 million seed funding. Points says it’s claims to be the “the first truly scalable blockchain data collaboration protocol for better credit scoring and inclusive finance” a claim that narrow enough to be true. Blockchain!

Business intelligence vendor Qlik has purchased data integration platform Podium Data. Podium lets non-technical users ingest, transform, and publish all types of data, including personal identifiers, on a Hadoop foundation. We never identified it as a CDP but it probably qualifies. As this article from Xconomy points out, there have been quite a few acquisitions of data management platforms recently – including the Salesforce / Datorama deal.

More on data management: automated data analysis vendor Outlier has raised a $6 million Series A. Outlier integrates data from multiple enterprise systems and uses AI to alert users to interesting patterns. It does some customer-level analysis but doesn’t share the integrated data with other systems, so it’s not a CDP.

Account-based marketing system Terminus Software has little to do with enterprise data management but they were so quiet about their $11 million Series C that it’s worth mentioning because you might have missed it. The new round brings their total funding to $30.6 million per Crunchbase.

Personalization engine (and CDP) SessionM announced $23.8 million in new funding, with Salesforce Ventures as a lead investor. Coming on the heels of Salesforce’s Datorama acquisition last week, it suggests somebody at Salesforce has a new interest in customer data integration. You may also recall that SessionM expanded its own Salesforce integrations last week. Total funding is now $97.3 million.

We also have news that personalization vendor Qubit has a new integration with SAP’s ecommerce applications. Qubit unifies customer data from multiple sources and makes it available to analytical systems. This follows news of similar integration with the Salesforce Commerce Cloud. We haven’t classified them as a CDP but maybe we should.

Sticking with cloud platform integration: master data management vendor Reltio announced their system is now available on the Google Cloud Platform. Reltio provides predictive analytics as well as data discovery and consolidation. Yes, they’re a CDP.

More than two-thirds (68%) of IT decision makers believe unauthorized users can access their networks yet 93% would trust their organization to store their personal data, according to this survey from digital security vendor Gemalto. Weird. Consumers have picked up on the vibe: just 52% trust organizations to manage their personal data. Click here for a slick interactive version of the report that can compare results by country.

Worries about data security are well founded: 52% of U.S. retailers experienced a data breach in the past year, according to the Thales Data Threat Report. The number more than doubled from 19% the previous year. Lots of details including comparison of U.S. retail breach rates to global rates. Guess who has more breaches?

Why should bad guys have all the data moving fun? Facebook, Google, Twitter and Microsoft have plans for an open source data portability platform that will make it easy to share personal data between platforms. This would make it easier for people to switch providers although a cynic would also note it makes unauthorized sharing easy too.

Just when marketers were getting used to smart phones as their primary communications channel, smart speakers could displace them.