Amidst confusion and criticism, Adobe and Salesforce bring in their CDP platform

Adobe and Salesforce have entered the customer data platform (CDP) mix, opening a big opportunity for marketers seeking validation. The digital experience software providers, which seem to be going head-to-head in the martech race, launched CDPs within a day of one another.

At first Salesforce has announced the building of an “enterprise-grade Customer Data Platform” that extends Salesforce Customer 360. That platform is designed to “enhance data management across Salesforce apps" and provide access to customer data.

Next Adobe at its Adobe Summit, introduces the global availability of Adobe Experience Platform, a customer experience management (CXM) offering that includes a CDP. It will bring together known and anonymous data to activate real-time customer profiles across multiple channels with ‘intelligent decisioning and segmentation.’ It requires less technical assistance to manage than a data warehouse and puts marketing in direct control of the data unification project.

CDP inquiries among marketers have gone up, though questions still remain on what it means for their martech stacks. They want to know what a CDP actually is, what architecture is needed to achieve success and the implications for components of their martech stack.

According to a report, there’s a strong need to clarify not only what a CDP is and isn’t, but also how these platforms can deliver value to marketers. It has been also found that while more than 100 companies describe themselves as a CDP, fewer than 20 are true CDPs. Platforms that are able to ingest and integrate customer data from multiple sources; offer customer profile management; support “real-time” customer segmentation; and make customer data accessible to other systems is needed.

It is believed that Adobe and Salesforce’s move will further validate the market. The challenge for marketers still remains in the underlying data and how to effectively use it for experiences. Things like data cleansing, data enrichment and actually getting it into the CDP and making it actionable are still required.