composable cdp - Martech Therapy

Negotiating the New Martech Economy

Most Martech vendors talk about “transparency,” yet the real negotiation is about who ends up carrying the complexity. Part 3 explores how ownership, definitions, velocity, and data reality shape what you can truly negotiate in today’s CDP/CEP market.

The reactions to last week's part 2, The inherited costs of the composable stack, revealed something important about Martech today. People disagreed with one another, yet they were all touching the same truth from different angles. Some pointed out that composable savings mostly show up in use-case velocity rather than infrastructure. Others argued that cloud costs are a black box, no matter what you buy. A few reminded us that the data warehouse remains the gravitational center regardless of whether your CDP is composable or packaged.

What everyone circled around, though, was the same underlying question: who holds the

The inherited costs of the composable stack

In Martech, every pricing model hides a workload. Suites sell convenience. Composable platforms sell control. Either way, you pay for someone to hold the complexity, the only question is who.

Last week, in the first part of this series, I shared some experiences on how to read Martech pricing. In this second part, I want to examine the other end of the product spectrum and learn to live with it. Once you understand how vendors define usage, value, and fairness, a new question appears:

What happens when you try to escape those models altogether?

That’s where composability enters the story. It promises freedom from rigid licenses, bundled modules, and predefined ways of working. Build your own stack, plug in best-of-breed tools, let each component scale on its own terms.

Where CDPs quietly kept working

Every few months, someone posts another chart about the end of Customer Data Platforms. The logos change, the arrows move toward “composable,” and the takeaway is always the same *drum roll* the category is over. But when I look at what’s actually running inside mid-market marketing stacks, where I spend most of my days, the story doesn’t match the headline.

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Read part 1 here: If CDPs are dead, they’ve donated their organs...

The parts that never stopped working

What’s survived isn’t the marketing copy, that changes as often as the wind, but it’s the

If CDPs are dead, they’ve donated their organs...

Despite the headlines, Customer Data Platforms aren’t dead. Their best parts now power engagement platforms and data warehouses. This article explains why CDPs still matter, especially for mid-market businesses driving the next wave of customer data innovation.

Every week a new headline drops like a bomb. This company's app just killed another company's app, blew up something else, or declared the death of a technology category. As a military veteran, I find it strange how casually our industry borrows the language of conflict. There’s enough of that in real life.

Take Customer Data Platforms. Depending on who you follow, CDPs are either dead, obsolete, or absorbed beyond recognition. But as Brian Blessed once roared in Flash Gordon, “GORDON’S ALIVE!”

If he worked in martech, he’d be shouting, “CDP’S ARE ALIVE!”

From particle physics to privacy-first analytics

Mitzu's István Mészáros explains why the future of Martech runs on composable data

From CERN’s particle accelerators to the messy world of marketing data, István Mészáros has seen it all. In this episode of Couch Confidentials, we trace his path from working on the Large Hadron Collider to building Mitzu, a startup rethinking how companies approach composable analytics.

We talk about why centralizing KPIs matters more than shiny dashboards, how enterprise data culture often lags behind the technology, and why privacy is becoming as big a driver as scale.

I loved how István described the “people-pleaser” instinct that shaped his career, always chasing faster answers for colleagues, which eventually grew into a

When the customers speak, even Gartner listens

Hightouch’s Strong Performer nod shows how Voice of the Customer reshapes the CDP debate

Gartner released its 2025 Voice of the Customer report for CDPs at the end of August, and, well, I don’t want to say I told you so, “this was identified early on as a likely outcome”.

Memedroid on X: "I told you so #memes #professional #learning #itoldyouso #funny https://t.co/IRPCi2lj1x" / X

As I suggested in my earlier pieces on Gartner and the CDP market, where, based on Peer Insights, I generated a ‘review-driven’ alternative quadant, Hightouch scored a ‘Leader’ position compared to being completely excluded from the original report.

Based on the newly published official ‘review-driven’ quadrant, Hightouch has now earned a Strong Performer recognition. It’s always interesting when predictions line up with

Posts tagged with composable cdp

The parts that never stopped working