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Acquisitions of, or by, major CDP vendors have been vanishingly rare in recent years.  So news that ActionIQ  had been purchased by Uniphore generated an especially large amount of interest.  Let’s look at it from three perspectives. 1.    Significance for ActionIQ.  Although ActionIQ has been a significant CDP since its founding in 2014, the company was always a bit different from most other CDPs.  Rather than starting as a tag manager or messaging platform, ActionIQ’s roots were in big data technology: co-founders Tasso Argyros and Nitay Joffe were ..read more

Composable CDP is Dead. Sure, it’s a clickbait headline. But how else to gain attention on a topic that’s over-saturated with hype? Of course, I would never say something untrue just to gain attention. So let me clarify exactly what’s deceased. It isn’t composability or CDP, or the vendors who have adopted the “composable CDP” label. What’s dead is “composable CDP” as a distinct category of software. You might stop here to argue that “composable CDP” was never a meaningful category, and I wouldn't necessarily disagree. But the term did have a broad meaning along the lines of “software com ..read more

On July 16 and July 18 2024, the CDP Institute hosted a pair of online roundtable discussions for industry vendors. Here are summaries of the conversations ..read more

Back in February, I mentioned that CDP Institute had published a Composable CDP Self-Assessment Tool that asks people what gaps they must fill to convert their current systems into the functional equivalent of a CDP. I recently checked how many responses we’ve received, and was disappointed that there were just fourteen. Obviously this isn’t enough to draw statistically meaningful conclusions, especially when you bear in mind that the audience of CDP Institute members can’t be considered representative of the industry as a whole. But I summarized the answers anyway to see what rough patterns m ..read more

The CDP Institute runs periodic roundtables where our members discuss industry issues.  We had one earlier this week on the topic of helping companies make use of an existing CDP.  We chose that topic because we frequently hear that many users don’t know what to do with a CDP after it’s built. The initial discussion followed the more or less expected path towards solutions such as developing change champions and publicizing success stories to encourage CDP use.  Participants stressed the need for organizational change to allow applications that the CDP makes possible.  Th ..read more

Has anyone asked you recently about the past, present, and future of Customer Data Platforms?  No?  That's odd; people ask me those questions all the time.  Here are my current answers.  It’s eleven years since the term “customer data platform” appeared in 2013.  What stages has it gone through over that time?   The first stage was just to recognize that CDP was a separate category of software.  What was new about CDP was that it was packaged software that was building a customer database.  Before then, customer databases were custom projects, like a d ..read more

Last weekend brought the intriguing rumor that Salesforce is in late stage talks to acquire data integration vendor Informatica.   This followed the previous week’s rumor that Google-parent Alphabet is consideringan offer for Salesforce-competitor HubSpot, and came the same week as a slew of partnership announcements tied to Snowflake’s Marketing Data Cloud Forum. You don’t need a crazy wall to see how these events are connected.  Cloud database vendors including Google and Snowflake are expanding into marketing applications.  This poses an obvious threat to customer clou ..read more

“Composable CDP” has been consuming much attention at CDP Institute as we wrestle with how best to help buyers who are considering it as an option.  The Institute published a Composable CDP Self-Assessment tool a few weeks ago, which gives a checklist of the functions required to replicate the profile-building capabilities of a standard CDP.  This was intended as the centerpiece of our Composable CDP Knowledge Hub but has attracted fewer users than expected.   The explanation I find most plausible is that few people can answer the Self-Assessment’s detailed questions about ..read more