Data quality and identity tool vendor Melissa has announced a “comprehensive customer data management platform” that combines Melissa’s data cleaning and enrichment with Pentaho data extraction, transformation, and loading. The combined solution, called Contact Zone, includes a drag-and-drop interface for building process flows and hundreds of integrated connectors to common source systems. It’s probably too technical to consider a CDP but it’s certainly something a company’s IT department could use to build their own unified customer database.

Alphonso also watches the OTT watchers, in its case through content recognition software embedded in more than 30 million smart TVs, gaming consoles, mobile apps, and other devices.

With CDP vendors increasing their workforces by 3.4% in six months, compared with an average of 0.2% each six months over the prior two years, the sector seems to be growing again, according to our own semi-annual industry update. There is much talk of composable CDPs but they still employ no more than 5% of the sector workforce. What is a clear trend is the acquisition of independent CDPs by vendors interested in adding a CDP to a larger system (usually an activation system).