composable cdp - Martech Therapy

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

Meet the CDP Simulator, the easiest way to finally understand your data stack

The CDP Simulator is a free, interactive way to see how customer data actually moves through traditional, composable, and hybrid stacks. Click, explore, and watch the architecture come alive without needing a single slide.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve tried to explain a CDP diagram that looked like someone spilled spaghetti on a slide. If you’ve ever been in a meeting where five people are discussing “real time” and each one means something completely different, you probably know the feeling.

So instead of drawing yet another arrow-filled diagram, I built something people can actually play with.

CDP Simulator displaying David Chan's inspired Hybrid architecture.

The CDP Simulator is now live. It’s free, and you can get started in about three seconds. No signup, no

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

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

Posts tagged with composable cdp