Like (old) IBM and (current) Oracle, Microsoft is both a purveyor of MarTech infrastructure — chiefly Azure — as well as some mid-market engagement services, primarily under the Dynamics moniker.  In general Redmond has not been very aggressive in this space, especially as it had to labor for some years to "cloudify" the Dynamics suite, rewriting some platforms along the way.

So it was a bit surprising to see Microsoft wade into the rising pool of Customer Data Platform vendors with its Dynamics 365 Customer Insights offering — formerly just an analytics service, but now a self-described CDP.

This week RSG added an evaluation of Microsoft's latest platform to our CDP evaluation research stream.  Research subscribers can log in to download the chapter immediately.  Your firm not yet a subscriber?  Try a sample, first.

To quote from our evaluation:

At this point Redmond has shown an ability to abstract customer data from its Dynamics-based engagement systems, but compared to other CDPs, you can't actually do very much with it.

In short, as usual we're skeptical, though it's early days for Redmond here...