The customer data platform (CDP) market is highly fragmented, with vendors who share a “same core story” struggling to differentiate themselves by targeting specific verticals and use cases.

This is just one of the findings in new research released today by Related Digital an independent analyst firm that helps buyers select enterprise technology.

A lot of these guys are doing what you might call marketing data support, or marketing data warehouses or just data integration platforms. And I think it took a while for a core set of capabilities to coalesce and kind of come of age. But when it did, it happened pretty quickly. That’s what's so impressive. There's an enormous amount of customer interest and also investor interest.

Research by The a vendor-neutral trade organization founded by David Raab, offers some numbers that put Byrne's growth story in perspective: Its reported employment in the industry grew by 76 percent over the past year, with $114 million in new funding in the first half of 2018, an increase of 26 percent over the $90 million added during the same period in 2017.

On the heels of the subcsription required), we caught up with RSG researchers and other CDP industry watchers to discuss the rise of CDPs and where the industry is potentially heading.

What’s the Core CDP Story?

The RSG report uncovered what its researchers called a “core story”: CDP vendors unify the customer data environment and make data more “marketing friendly to manipulate,” according to Byrne. “There's a lot of traditional kind of data management services including being able to ingest data from various sources and do identity resolution which is a really big deal, handling the security around PII, and all that.”

Byrne cited cloud-based architectures, modern API frameworks and innovations in Artificial Intelligence (AI) as three major factors opening the door to vendor entry in CDPs. Secure multi-tenant implementations in the cloud builds a good story around building cloud-native toolsets, and modern API frameworks allow vendors to quickly build all the connectors organizations need, Byrne added. AI innovations help with data ingestion and identity resolution and data cleaning, he added.