CDP Institute

Amazon Web Services also has news: an AWS Data Exchange to streamline the process of finding and using third party data. I The program launches with more than 1,000 data products including sets from Reuters, Change Healthcare, Dun & Bradstreet, and Foursquare. Any personal data is properly anonymized, of course.

Here’s yet another acquisition of a recommendation engine vendor: digital experience platform Episerver has purchased Idio, which tracks individual customer behaviors and recommends best actions in real time. This follows recent acquisitions of Custora by Amperity, RichRelevance by Manthan, and Boxx.ai by Netcore.

Komiko is a different type of recommendation engine: it predicts buyer behaviors and suggests best actions to sales people. They’ve just been bought, too, by market intelligence vendor ZoomInfo, which in turn is owned by B2B data compiler DiscoveryOrg.

This study from investment firm ComCap puts these deal in perspective with an overview of the marketing software industry and deep(ish) dives into customer engagement platforms (personalization engines), digital experience platforms (delivery engines), and CDPs. They project a 27.5% annual growth for CDP from 2019 through 2025. Also includes detailed lists of marketing software funding, acquisitions, and public companies.

How confused is everyone (except you, Dear Reader) about CDPs? This Forrester survey of marketing and sales leaders found that 89% of say they have a CDP but just 11% are actually creating a unified customer profile, which is the core CDP function. Better news: those 11% are 3.4x more likely to report double-digit revenue growth than everyone else. Lots of great info here.

Simpler Media Group pegged CDP deployment at 22% (including other customer data management systems) in a survey of executives from marketing, IT, CX, and other areas. Companies with effective customer experience systems were more likely to have a CDP or customer data management system in place. Other interesting results on personalization, artificial intelligence, privacy, and other issues.

We might as well finish with another survey. Accenture found that companies who are “strategically scaling” artificial intelligence are getting better results than companies that just do Proof of Concept tests. The strategic scalers are also more likely to invest in data management. No explicit mention here of CDPs but you get the idea.

Adobe has officially released its Real-time Customer Data Platform, after many pre-announcements. It’s like the wedding night of a couple who have lived together for years: fun but no surprises. They also released new customer journey analytics and journey orchestration products, also previously in beta.

More big tech news: Oracle has launched a B2C version of its Customer Data Management service, which was previously available for B2B organizations. Components include a customer data hub to maintain a master customer record, a.k.a. “golden record”, data quality services using AI and third party data sources, and global address verification.

Lest we neglect Salesforce and Microsoft: those two have expanded their relationship by moving the Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Microsoft Azure. The switch will improve performance, enhance scalability, and reduce deployment times. Not that those were problems. The companies also plan to connect Salesforce Sales and Service Clouds with Microsoft Teams.

When Microsoft bought LinkedIn for $26 billion, observers suspected the justification for the price was closer connection of LinkedIn data with Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM system. Sure enough, the company has just announced a “Data Validation” feature that will automatically update Dynamics CRM when LinkedIn learns that a contact has changed companies. As Microsoft puts it quite nicely, “It’s one simple field – but with a lot of powerful uses for Sales Operations teams and users alike.”

SnapLogic has extended its quest to empower expertise-free “citizen integrators”. Its latest feature, called Pipeline Synthesis, lets users identify the two systems they want to connect and then creates an end-to-end process to make it happen. It’s not clear whether the interface is entirely drag-and-drop or users still must know how to read.