The Best Customer Data Platforms (CDPs): The 2023 CRM Industry Leader Awards

THE MARKET

Research firm Mordor Intelligence values the worldwide customer data platforms market at $2.6 billion this year and expects it to reach $8.6 billion by 2028, growing at a compound annual rate of 27.4 percent. This growth, it says, is being fueled by growing demand for real-time analysis of consumer behavior across industries, a growing need for companies to personalize customer interactions, and the proliferation of customer channels, particularly for marketing outreach. And these systems are only getting more capable and user-friendly as the software vendors bring artificial intelligence into them.

On the negative side, though, the firm says data privacy and security concerns continue to loom, noting that few companies still have the necessary security measures in place.

Research firm Extrapolate, whose market value projections are slightly lower than Mordor’s, says the retail and e-commerce segments dominate the CDP market, while the healthcare, financial services, government, telecommunications, and media and entertainment segments are also anticipated to contribute to the growth of the market.

Extrapolate notes that cloud-based solutions dominate the market, as they streamline workflows and eliminate storage issues. That’s important, given the amount of data typical customer data platforms can hold.

THE TOP FIVE

Adobe’s entry in the category is its Real-Time CDP, part of the Adobe Experience Cloud. With the shift toward first-party data in full swing, more marketers are turning to Adobe Real-Time CDP to manage and segment their data and deliver personalized experiences to customers. A recent integration with LiveRamp is making it easier for them to activate their first-party data across partners and platforms. LiveRamp’s people-based identifier, RampID, is now available to Adobe Real-Time CDP users. “Unlocking RampID for our marketers enables them to improve marketing personalization by finding the authenticated, privacy-safe audiences they want across all major digital platforms and nearly every top publisher,” said Anjul Bhambhri, senior vice president of Adobe Experience Cloud, in a statement.

TheLoops offers what it calls an intelligent support operations data platform that enables real-time support by contextualizing customer, product, and usage data for agents and department managers. John Ragsdale, distinguished researcher and vice president of technology ecosystems at the Technology Services Industry Association, says TheLoops “has reinvented the concept of a customer data platform with a virtual data lake approach that is able to identify friction points in the customer experience at every step of the customer journey, show correlations between specific experiences and desired business outcomes, and apply predictive analysis on account success and annual recurring revenue.”

Like every other vendor in the space, Microsoft has been hard at work adding artificial intelligence to its Dynamics 365 Customer Insights data platform. The centerpiece of this movement has been Copilot, which provides interactive, AI-powered assistance for Customer Insights, allowing users to ask questions using natural language to explore, analyze, and understand customer data. Geoff Ables, managing partner of C5 Insights, says Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, especially when paired with Microsoft Dataverse, offers “broad customer data system-of-record capabilities, including master data management, analytics, customer profiling, and more.”

Oracle’s CDP product, sold under the Unity moniker, got a massive upgrade with 15 baseline AI models that exploit Oracle’s more than 40 years of data modeling experience. Part of Oracle Fusion Cloud Customer Experience, Oracle Unity blends AI with customizable, industry-specific data models to deliver personalized experiences. “Oracle is in a position of strength with its CDP, particularly with the performance of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and the Autonomous Database and the ability to integrate transactional and supply chain data,” says Rebecca Wettemann, founder and CEO of Valoir.

Salesforce already had a powerful data foundation, which it’s been reinforcing with Einstein and Einstein GPT AI technologies. Wettemann calls them “a key foundation” of Salesforce’s products going forward. Salesforce, she says further, “continues to invest in helping customers bring their data house in order with its CDP.”