martechoutlook

The Growth of Customer Data Platforms

Martech Outlook | Friday, November 30, 2018

The Customer Data Platform (CDP) Institute published its third edition of the bi-annual industry update, which provides a consolidated summary of trends and practices over a fixed period of time. Enthusiasts can now factor in the data from the past three years and analyze how the industry has performed during this time frame. The report shows a 25 percent growth correlating to the number of employees on LinkedIn while also stressing on the vendor count, which is reported to have doubled since the previous report. While some might claim that report does not account for all the employees, as many of them might not have registered on LinkedIn, the actual growth reported is still significant.

Another major factor about the report is that all the added vendors are not newer companies themselves. This means only a considerable part of these vendors were founded after the year 2014, which clearly highlights the fact that these companies have come to the limelight as they must have recently launched their products or services. There are also older firms re-establishing themselves CDPs which account for the increase in vendor count. The interesting bit about this research is that the recently added vendors drift more towards customer engagement solutions when compared with the initial list. Of course, it is not certain that the engagement-based CDPs would establish a supremacy over the industry’s market share, but what is certain is the fact that data analysis-oriented organizations would likely account for the majority share in the industry.

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