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.

Like the determined optimist who tells his boss the factory is on fire by reporting they’ll soon be able to update their equipment, let’s find some silver linings in a batch of gloomy surveys today, Dear Reader.  We’ll start with this Fivetran report, which finds that 85% of data leaders say their company has lost money by basing decisions on bad data, and 66% believe their C-suite can’t tell when that happens.  The bright side is there’s lots of room for improvement.