CDP Institute

And completing our little tour of mobile data news, cross-device identity company Drawbridge announced a 60 day free trial of a dashboard that lets marketers test the impact of different matching algorithms. This is a clever move that gives skeptical marketers a low-risk way to explore Drawbridge’s capabilities. Drawbridge connects more than one billion consumers and five billion devices.

One of the fastest-growing applications for artificial intelligence is extracting business information from the Web. Crayon, founded in 2014, lets clients specify companies to follow and then sends a real-time feed of over 100 types of information including price and message changes, new products, and online reviews. Crayon says it has 42,000 users for its free and paid products. It just raised $3.35 million, bringing total funding to $5.1 million.

A survey from Sapient Nitro and the Martech Conference finds that 55% of marketing technologists have a marketing or business while just 21% have a technical degree.

Japanese tech giant Fujitsu has announced a technology-plus-consulting offering to support real time marketing through data integration. The “eXperience Data Platform” (XDP) is built around the Tealium customer data platform, which ingests data from Web, CRM, call center, inventory, and other systems; consolidates and loads it into a customer database; and makes the information available for analysis and marketing programs across all channels. For the moment, it’s available only in Japan.

Reflecting its focus on complete customer view, Customer Data Platform provider AscentCRM has reinvented itself as Ascent360. The three year old firm delivers integrated customer data, marketing analytics, and strategy for more than 100 brands in the outdoor, resort, and sporting retail industries.

Customer Data Platform mParticle was one of handful of audience providers selected for a new partner program announced by Pinterest. The arrangement makes it easy for clients to upload audiences to Pinterest to target and to find similar audiences. Other vendors in the program are Epsilon, Experian, Krux (Salesforce), LiveRamp (Acxiom), and Neustar. mPartner is specializes in combining mobile and other data within its CDP.

This post takes a close look at ActionIQ, a Customer Data Platform with deep roots in big data.  The system loads source data in its original file structure.  Users can then define derived variables to create their preferred view of the data and see the results in seconds.  We could tell you how it’s done but then we’d have to…well, you know.

CallidusCloud, which offers sales support and enablement applications, acquired Datahug Limited, a SaaS predictive forecasting and sales analytics company. Datahug’s specialty is predictive analysis of sales pipelines but it will be the core of a new Predictive Analytics, AI and Machine Learning innovation center that will presumably develop other applications in the future.

Couchbase, one of the leading NoSQL databases, announced new capabilities including full text search and real time analytics. NoSQL databases are the foundation of many CDPs because they are much easier to work with than standard relational databases, especially when it comes to adding new data sources.

In case you’re wondering why we need all those fancy analytics and database technologies, here’s one reason: to use the new streams of customer data gathered by beacons and other sensors.

Tableau announced plans to become a complete data platform, extending backwards from its data visualization interface to data preparation tools, a high-scale in-memory database, natural language queries, and machine learning-based recommendations. Customer data is just one part of the picture but surely an important one.

Customer support giant Zendesk has relaunched itself as a collection of products including a customer data collector called Connect, which will unify customer interactions from all systems and make them available for segmentation, analysis, and campaigns. This isn’t quite as unprecedented as it might sound: customer success firms like Gainsight have built unified databases for years. But it’s definitely another contender hoping to be the center of your customer data universe.