by Thomas Wieberneit | Jun 5, 2025 | Blog |
In the past few years, I have written about CDPs, what they are and what their value is – or rather can be. My definition of a CDP that I laid out in one of my column articles on CustomerThink is: A Customer Data Platform is a software that creates persistent, unified customer records that enable business processesthat have the customers’ interests and objectives in mind. It is a good thing that CDPs evolved from its origins of being a packaged software owned by marketers, serving marketers. Having looked at CDP’s as a band aid that fixes the proliferation of data silos that emerged for a number of reasons, I have ultimately come to the conclusion and am here to say that the customer data platform as an entity is increasingly becoming irrelevant – or in the typical marketing hyperbole – dead. Why is that? There are mainly four reasons for it. For one, many an application has its own CDP variant already embedded as part of enabling its core functionality. Any engagement solution that is worth a grain of salt needs the analytical capabilities that a CDP offers, and hence offers them itself. Why do the additional investment of buying things that one already has once more? This only increases cost and IT landscape complexity while acquiring capabilities that partially are already available. In addition, there is no real and concise definition anymore, with even the CDP Institute differentiating use types and/or scopes of CDPs. If you are looking at what other vendors (Salesforce, Oracle) or analysts (here: Gartner) are saying, the water becomes even more muddy. The...
