Since the origin of data platforms, there have been many developments in this field. Different platforms have come and gone. Some stayed back, modified to fit the latest requirements. It is difficult to categorize the different types of CDPs that are available in the market today, and there are quite a number of them. The CDP market is fragmented, with more than 100 players. However, we have identified the most important ones among those.
Figure 2.6: The CDP market is very fragmented with more than 100 players (source: https://chiefmartec.com/2020/04/marketing-technology-landscape-2020-martech-5000/)
CDPs can be classified as follows:
- MarTech Suites: These are CDP offerings from MarTech vendors. They are integrated with other tools from the same vendor. These are more engagement or data management oriented with the former more prevalent. Example: Salesforce Data cloud for marketers ( previously Salesforce CDP), Adobe real-time customer data platform, and so on.
- Engagement-oriented CDP: These are pure play CDPs focusing more on engagement and offering self-service capabilities like self-service segmentation, journey orchestration, audience builder, and so on. Example: Segment, Tealium, Blueshift, and so on. They are the preferred choice for marketers as they are powerful marketing solutions. User Activation is the main goal.
- Data Management oriented CDP: These types of CDPs focus more on data management like ingestion, profile unification, data cleansing, identity resolution, and so on. The main job is to connect different sources of data and unify and transform customer data. These are not activation tools and require other third-party tools for activation. Data management CDPs are further classified based on where the data is stored. Some CDPs act as data storehouses where the customer data is stored. Whereas others are data warehouse-agnostic CDPs where you are free to use the data warehouse of your choice to store the data. Your data, your Warehouse. These offer the most flexibility and you are not locked in for a particular data storage partner. Examples are RudderStack, Treasure Data, mparticle, and so on.