CDP Institute

Looker is a data access and analysis tool that logically restructures SQL data sources.

Kount offers fraud detection services to merchants and payment processors. They have a “data orchestration hub”, which combines a client’s own data with third party data from Neustar, Experian, LexisNexis, and others. That’s kind of CDP-ish, although a true CDP could be used for more than fraud detection. They have just added Whitepages Pro, global identity verification service, as a data source.

Aprimo has gone through several evolutions but now positions itself as cloud-based marketing operations software. It just announced an expanded integration framework of APIs and Web hooks to simplify connections with other marketing management systems. This is emphatically not about customer data.  Instead, it’s about marketing processes such as planning, budgeting, project management, media buying, content creation, and measurement. The basic organizational unit is a marketing “activity” such as an email campaign or media buy. It’s useful to occasionally remind ourselves that marketers need more than customer data.

Intertrust Technologies (great name, by the way) provides behind-the-scenes technologies to help companies control access to their content and data. We’re talking things like encryption, rights management, and tamper-proof application code. Part of their business involves digital rights management, which gives them an inside view of who’s consuming what. They’ve just announced the next generation of Personagraph, a private marketplace that lets publishers turns this information into biddable mobile app advertising inventory. The marketplace resides in Intertrust’s own Data Management Platform (DMP) system.  It’s highly secure, naturally.

Brandwatch offers social media listening and analytics.

Speaking of wonders, artificial intelligence is probably the most wondrous thing of all right now.

Gravy Analytics has an intriguing business: they build a huge database of real world events, like a yoga class, wine tasting, or real estate open house, and then uses location information from mobile app partners to identify the devices that attended.

Not satisfied with knowing who attended your event?

But why stop at tracking people when there are so many other Internet-connected things in the world? Glympse lets people (or companies) track locations of connected devices, which could include phones, fitness trackers, cars, packages, delivery trucks, or service people. It recently announced FamilyMap, which lets people share location information within a private group. There’s no mention of using the data for customer tracking or advertising, although the company’s privacy policy leaves open that possibility. With consent, of course.

Sure, we’re biased. But the numbers are mostly from public sources that have no particular ax to grind. We found the 27 CDP vendors had just over $300 million revenue in 2016 and are growing at better than 50% annually, which would lead to $1 billion in revenue for 2019. Download the full report for vendor list, funding, client counts, and other details.

Not willing to take our word that data access is a growing industry? My feelings are hurt but it will pass. Here’s a bit more evidence: marketing automation consultants Sojourn Solutions have just announced an application to extract data from Oracle Eloqua. It “eliminates manual workarounds and tedious exports”, which sure sounds like a good idea. The point being, there’s a widely-felt need to pull data out of operational systems and make it available to other systems. You know, like a CDP does

Still not convinced?  Process this: zeotap extracts data from telecom systems and makes it available for ad targeting. Business is good enough to justify a €12 million Series B. And, the company is expanding to gather data from other industries including security and navigation services. Case closed.