API connections are another way that companies can patch together something resembling a CDP (or do a lot of other, non-CDP things). RapidAPI has made a business of helping companies to find, manage, and build APIs. They just raised a $150 million Series D, having grown to more than four million users since they were founded in 2015.
Data movement platform RudderStack has announced an integration to easily move data in and out of cross-channel marketing platform Iterable. Rudderstack calls itself a “warehouse-first, CDP built for developers”, although it doesn’t meet the CDP Institute definition because it doesn’t maintain customer profiles. It does provide one of the tools that companies can combine to mimic CDP functionality.
Devs wanna dev, but business users have other priorities. Almost three quarters (72%) of the in-store retail decision makers queried by Forrester for CX solution vendor Uberall said they’d favor a platform that unified separate point solutions to address marketing and CX needs. Similar numbers felt their company did a less-than-good job of providing seamless customer journeys across all touchpoints.
CDP mParticle is being acquired by ecommerce platform Rokt for a price of $300 million. It’s the third acquisition of a leading independent CDP in a little over one month, following Uniphore’s purchase of ActionIQ and Contentstack’s purchase of Lytics. All three buyers offer some type of customer-facing technology; apparently they’ve decided that adding real-time profiles from CDP will give them a competitive edge. (See this blog post for more analysis.)