New research from independent analyst firm Real Story Group finds a growing field of Customer Data Platform (CDP) vendors. These vendors seek to address long standing needs of marketing departments for unified customer and prospect records to support omnichannel engagement.

Published today at https://www.realstorygroup.com/Reports/CDP/, and available by subscription, Real Story Group’s vendor evaluations analyze the strengths and weaknesses of 18 major CDP offerings.

Customer Data Platforms collect and aggregate customer information from various sources, such as CRM, Ecommerce, and other engagement and analytics systems. Marketers use CDPs to better understand, segment, and engage their customers and prospects. Key research findings include:

• CDP is an unusually fragmented marketplace. Vendors are riding a significant wave of customer and investor interest.
• Cloud-based architectures, modern API frameworks, and AI innovations have significantly reduced barriers to vendor entry. RSG expects even more CDP players to emerge.
• The current crop of vendors can appear similar on the surface, but use-case emphasis makes them quite diverse under the covers.
• CDP vendors tend to be small, but well-funded. Customers concerned with viability will likely find their worst-case exposure limited to an “undead” zombie supplier, rather than an outright collapse.
• Big vendors like Adobe, IBM, Oracle, and Salesforce have entered the CDP market via acquisition or rebranding existing data-integration offerings. However, their CDPs tend to be more parochially bound to connecting their own suites rather than serving as more universal data platforms.

Real Story Group expects more M&A activity in this space, as other large vendors seek to round out their suites, but we do not expect major consolidation and reduction in the number of CDP vendors in the near term.

A sample RSG vendor evalution is available for free download.
 

Analyst Quotes:

Marketers quite rightly want to replace siloed customer record stores and complex data warehouse environments they can’t control,” notes RSG founder Tony Byrne, “but they need to carefully test even the most ‘marketing-friendly’ CDPs against specific use cases to ensure the technology will actually work for them.

The CDP marketplace is evolving at a very rapid pace,” adds RSG contributing analyst, Apoorv Durga, “and while MarTech suite vendors are starting to up their game here, pure-play start-ups still hold the lead in terms of marketer usability and channel-agnostic feature sets.