BOSTON, MA - Last year saw the six largest MarTech vendors launch or reconsolidate their Customer Data Platform (CDP) offerings, but new research from independent analyst firm Real Story Group finds their offerings still lagging the market.

Published on https://www.realstorygroup.com/Reports/cdp and available by subscription, Real Story Group’s vendor evaluations analyze the strengths and weaknesses of 30 major CDP offerings. 

RSG recently updated its evaluations of Acoustic/IBM, Adobe, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce.  Here are some of the findings.

• The primary initial use case for each vendor seems to be unifying data within their own suites, rather than envisioning a truly independent data layer. This has had some impact on how vendors approach segmenting as well as data schemas in general. 
• None of them excel today at B2B scenarios (though a couple are trying); to be fair, this parallels a broader deficit in the marketplace as a whole.
• The six solutions feel young and comparatively feature-thin right now.
• The vendors are approaching the challenge of packaged connectors to external data sources with varying degrees of enthusiasm. 
• In each case the CDP depends on services from other platforms in the vendors' suites. 

The platforms do differ in several respects, for example how omnichannel in focus, as opposed to just marketing-oriented use cases.

The CDP marketplace divides roughly into two categories: major MarTech suite vendors and pure-play, independent alternatives.

RSG's solution evaluations rate vendors across nine specific CDP business use cases.

Analyst Quotes:

“The larger story here is how these major players will respond to a new decade where the MarTech / CX game is changing profoundly. Having invested in beefing up lucrative (but siloed) engagement-tier platforms, they are going to have to evolve in an environment where enterprises will want a more layered, omnichannel tech stack.” notes RSG founder Tony Byrne, “That stack will invariably contain multiple vendors, many of whom compete with each other.”

“Last year, all these vendors came to acknowledge that CDPs had become more than a passing fad, and all have invested to varying degrees in bringing packaged platforms to market, but none of them feel complete.” adds RSG analyst, Jarrod Gingras.

Read the full article on LinkedIn here.

RSG sells this evaluation research on a subscription basis.

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