Recent news from the Customer Data Platform (CDP) market has tended to revolve around mergers & acquisitions and -- of course! -- AI-related enhancements.

At Real Story Group we actually don't read too much into either. As my colleague Apoorv pointed out in a recent advisory paper on CDP evolution (🔒), the CDP market has seen consistently high levels of M&A since its inception. This year is no different. As for artificial intelligence, we tend to see the most important AI developments happening upstream from a CDP, despite the demo candy vendors may present.

The bigger marketplace trend -- as usual for CDPs -- is architectural.

Hybrid Composable Is Winning

After just completing evaluation updates to half the CDP vendors we cover, it's now clear that "hybrid composable" architectural models have come to dominate this landscape. The transition remains far from complete, but the directional pattern is clear: defer to an enterprise lakehouse or data fabric as the customer source of truth, and then layer in true marketer self-service and real-time eventing. The latter may require an additional repository or cache.

You can find more analysis in this week's press release.

Categorizing the Marketplace

We've also updated RSG's marketplace categorization. As before, we see clear bifurcations between independent suppliers and (generally lagging) suite-based CDP offerings, as well as a continuum for how much a platform focuses on data processing versus data activation.

The CDP marketplace remains broad and extremely fragmented, though categories continue to emerge.
In this latest overview we've called out separate boxes for:

• B2B-oriented vendors - a lot of customer frustration here, actually
• Warehouse-only (primarily reverse-ETL) vendors - losing some of their moment in the sun as more robust CDPs adapt their architectures for composability

Find Out More

Subscribers can access our evaluations immediately (🔒) to dive deeper into these insights.

Your firm does not yet subscribe? You can still download a free sample of RSG's CDP evaluations and have a look.