CDP Institute

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.

Everybody wants to get in on the act.

Customer Data Platform vendor Treasure Data announced a $25 million funding round, bringing its total investment to $54 million. The four year old firm has recently extended its focus beyond data integration for analytics to include data integration for customer management. It has over 200 clients.

Austria-based B2C marketing cloud Emarsys has raised $22.3 million to expand R&D and fuel growth. The round is the 16-year-old company’s second, following a $33 million raise in September 2015. Emarsys has roots in email marketing but now builds a unified customer profile to supports mobile, SMS, Web personalization, and advertising with a heavy dose of machine intelligence along the way. The company has more than 1,500 clients, mostly outside the U.S.

CDPs don’t have all the funding fun: PR measurement company TrendKit has added $16 million to its $36 million investment total. What’s to measure, you might ask? Lots of stuff, including readership, share of voice, sentiment, social amplification, and message pull-through, as well as impact on search engine ranking, Web traffic, and audience engagement. And they package all this in presentation-ready graphics.

This is one of those milestones that you were coming or maybe had happened already: Web analytics company StatCounter reports that October was the first month it tracked more Web page views on mobile phones and tablets than desktop PCs.

Wow, is this a coincidence or what? Here’s a tidbit about cross-device identity recognition, which is essential for tracking mobile activity at the customer level. Here we learn that the Foursquare social network has adopted Drawbridge as its “cross-device identity provider of record,” whatever that might mean. The real feather in Drawbridge’s hat is that Foursquare tested competing cross-device identity vendors and Drawbridge was the winner.

In largely unrelated news, research firm Forrester and software vendor Verint have partnered to embed Forrester’s Customer Experience Index surveys within Verint Enterprise Feedback Management deployments. Forrester will analyze data from the surveys, compare them to benchmarks, and display the results within the Verint solution. This will help companies measure the quality of the experiences they’re providing and identify areas for improvement.

Walker Sands and Chief Martech released a State of Marketing Technology 2017 survey whose respondents rated 48% of their companies and 60% of themselves personally as innovators or early adopters of marketing technology.

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?