Hands-On Salesforce Data Cloud

Foreword

Back in 2016–17, I was a research VP at Gartner covering a new technology category called customer data platforms (CDPs), and the most common question my team and I got was “What is this thing called a CDP?” That is not a rhetorical question: we counted how many times people asked the question, and they really wanted to know.

At the time, CDPs were power-walking up the Gartner Hype Cycle, and the man who first named them—the marketing technology consultant David Raab—delivered a keynote address at the 2018 MarTech Conference in Boston called “CDP Cures Baldness!”

Raab was kidding about baldness (I think)—but it’s true that as CDPs reached the peak of inflated expectations in the late 2010s, a majority of larger enterprises with complex customer data diasporas at least considered adding a CDP into their stack. Most of them now have at least one.

The CDP category grew from almost nothing in the mid-2010s to an estimated $10 billion market in 2025, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC). As a tech-historical phenomenon, the CDP is unusual. It’s also enjoyed an ongoing cartographic evolution as different users have drawn different boundaries around it and customer relationship management (CRM), master data management, data warehouses, lakes, marts, and more.

In fact, the CDP arose to solve a very specific problem in enterprise technology: trapped data. Its first proponents were marketers, particularly retailers, who had inherited (or built) dozens of fairly ...