Composable CDP: architecture, cost and trade-offs

Identity Resolution: a practitioner's guide to who owns the match

Identity resolution is a set of business decisions about who counts as the same person. Five approaches, and what each one costs you in ownership.

In part 4 of the Agentic CDP series I made a claim and then moved on rather quickly.

Identity resolution stops being a data-team hygiene project and becomes a precondition for anything agentic being trusted with a budget.

That deserved more than the paragraph it got, so here is the longer version.

Your agentic CDP will optimize whatever you measure

Every agentic CDP will be sold on goals-based marketing. That assumes a goal an agent can chase and a signal fast enough to learn from. Most teams have neither.

Martech Therapy: CDP strategy and agentic AIMatthew Niederberger

Right-time marketing and the speed of context decay

"Real-time" hides three different clocks. What it means from a data warehouse, why context decay is the real metric, and where five CDPs draw the line.

Every customer data vendor sells real-time. It's on the homepage, in the demo, in the answer to question fourteen of that RFP in front of your nose. The word carries a lot of weight, yet most of that weight stays out of view.

Ask what real-time actually means once the data lives in a warehouse, and that single word splits into three separate jobs that you can remember with the CDP acronym, too.

The first is collect: getting an event into the system at all. A click, a purchase, a page view, arriving through an SDK, a

How Snowflake recruited Zeotap's composable CDP

Zeotap's composable CDP now runs inside Snowflake as a Native App. Snowflake recruited it, the way Databricks built CustomerLake.

Zeotap's composable CDP is live on the Snowflake Marketplace, running inside your own Snowflake account as a Native App. That is the announcement, and it is the boring half.

The half I care about came from Jonaten Kraus at Snowflake, who spent about six months on this before it shipped and then wrote up what really happened on LinkedIn. His framing is the whole thing. Snowflake wasn't deciding whether to approve another marketplace app. It was deciding whether to treat Zeotap as a partner instead of a customer.

Snowflake picked a category vendor and pulled it deeper into

Composable CDP, translated for marketers

Composable CDP hands marketers a finished system and walks away. Four questions to ask before the architecture decision is locked in.

Let's face it, most composable CDP conversations are written for engineers, which makes sense, because engineers are the ones building the thing. The cost of that arrives later, and it arrives for the marketers who run the campaigns on top of the architecture, handed a finished system and told to make it work. I've written before about the inherited costs that creates. This piece is about the part that comes earlier, when the architecture is still a decision and not yet a fact.

The question a marketer should be able to ask in that room is plain. What

The CDP you weren't supposed to buy

Hightouch said the packaged CDP was dead weight. Four years on, Gartner lists it in the CDP Magic Quadrant. The architecture was right. The pitch skipped a step.

In 2022, Hightouch published a piece with a headline built to draw attention: Friends Don't Let Friends Buy a CDP. I remember where I first saw it, neck deep in my client's packaged CDP project. Sure, it was vendor content. Everyone knew it was vendor content. Nevertheless, it got passed around, because the frustration underneath it was real, and most of us had heard it, or even felt it.

The argument was simple enough to fit on a t-shirt. Your data already lives in the warehouse. Why pay a second vendor to copy it into a separate

The composable canvas & the cosmos

Data gravity is pulling everything together. AI is accelerating the journey. But for many organizations, the distance between systems, teams, and reality is still expanding. The future is clear. The path is less so.

I’ve been reading Databricks' and Scott Brinker’s recent paper on the New Martech Stack for the AI age. It’s one of those pieces that, just like studying astronomy, feels both clarifying and slightly unsettling at the same time.

Clarifying, because it puts words to something many of us have been feeling for a while. The stack is creaking. Integration is still eating time and energy. Data sits everywhere, but rarely works together in the way we need it to. So, the idea of moving toward a shared data foundation, with agents operating across it, makes intuitive sense.

Posts tagged with Composable CDP