I wish I had several Snowflake news items today, so I could call it a blizzard and amuse myself for two seconds.  But all I have it this announcement that Optimove now allows direct access to Optimove data that’s stored in Snowflake.  I can still point out that every Snowflake instance is unique.

This Merkle report on customer engagement contains a hail of factoids.  Item one: under one-third of companies use customer data throughout their organization; the rest (68%) limit it primarily to marketing.  Item two: ownership of the customer experience tech stack is split almost evenly between IT (54%) and marketing (48%, and yes that totals 102%).  Item three: the biggest hurdles to CDP use are implementation (27%) and bad data (24%); the lowest are strategy (9%), use case delivery (5%), and lack of central ownership (2%).

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).