SAP made some announcements related to customer experience (CX) at its annual conference in Florida. Like all its mega-vendor competitors, SAP says it will strengthen its CX Suite. Interestingly, this includes plans for rolling out a customer data platform (CDP).

Everyone wants a piece of the pie

I'm actually surprised it took them this long to jump in.  Most of the other biggies - Adobe, IBM, Oracle, Salesforce - are making a play in this marketplace. SAP is also part of Open Data Initiative, along with Microsoft and Adobe.

Details remain sparse but the product will check the usual CDP features: data ingestion, profile unification, identity resolution, and probably some amount of activation.  Many questions remain open, notably around where the CDP will reside physically.

Every platform wants to own your customer data, so it is not surprising that all kinds of enterprise software vendors are building CDP-like capabilities. CDP promises what EAI could not.

What should you do?

Keeping all your customer data in once place is a great objective. However, what that place should be is a tricky question.

As a stack owner, you need to decide whether your customer data should be a part of larger platform (like SAP or Salesforce) or should you be more conscious of "separation of concerns" and invest in an independent CDP. Both approaches have their pros and cons. 

If you want help with such questions, RSG's Omnichannel Stack Advisory can be very helpful.