customer data platform - Martech Therapy

Did CEPs just hand the data layer to Databricks?

Three engagement platforms made the same bet in the same week. Whether it pays off is more contingent than the announcements suggest.

In 2019, I had a client running both Segment and Iterable, and the recurring question was where to build the audiences. Segment could build them. It could not act on them. Only Iterable could turn an audience into a journey, so that is where the audiences got built. Segmentation followed the system that could do something with it. Segment lost that job, and before long it was replaced by Hightouch. Sound familiar?

I think about that sequence whenever the industry decides it has finally settled where customer data belongs, because the answer never stays put.

The latest move arrived in

Databricks CustomerLake: the data lakehouse is now the CDP

Databricks launched CustomerLake, a lakehouse-native agentic CDP. What it means for composable vendors, Databricks customers, and the next data platform.

Databricks announced CustomerLake at its Data + AI Summit just now, and the rumor is confirmed: it is a customer data platform. A real one. In 2026 no less. Marketer-facing, built natively inside the lakehouse, with agents doing the work that used to need a data team and a few weeks of lead time. The first agentic CDP a lakehouse has built for itself.

Only 16 people guessed right on my LinkedIn poll.

To be fair, I saw it before the keynote. Databricks invited me to a preview and asked what I made of it, which I took as a

A little lift never hurt anyone

Hightouch, Zeotap and mParticle now sell a toggle that lifts your match rate with identifiers you never collected. The gain is real. The work is the consent check nobody does before flipping it. What it does, and what to look at first.

You spend a week defining an audience in your CDP. Lapsed high-value customers, the ones actually worth winning back. You push the segment to Meta feeling good about it. Then the matched figure comes back at around sixty percent of what you sent, and the rest just isn't there. The platform couldn't recognise four in ten of your own customers.

Anyone who has run paid media knows that feeling. It's the match rate gap, and it has a few causes. People sign up with one email and log into Meta with another. Phones get replaced every

Diverted by design? What the CDP split means for the mid-market

The CDP market didn’t just split into platforms and agents. It quietly diverted the mid-market along the way. This piece looks at what changed, why many teams now hesitate, and how CEPs became the safer path for getting things done.

In last week's part 1, I described how Gartner finally named the split inside the CDP category in their Magic Quadrant for Customer Data Platforms 2026. Platformization on one side. Agentification on the other.

Two futures, both serious, both demanding.

That still leaves a simple question hanging:

Who is this actually built for?

Because when you read this year’s Magic Quadrant carefully, the most telling signal isn’t who moved up or down, which opens another can of worms. It’s the kind of organization the category quietly assumes as the norm.

Large teams. Strong data foundations. Time

The CDP split is official (and it’s not the one vendors were selling)

For years, CDPs have been stretched like the industry’s Spandex. Data foundation one moment, orchestration layer the next, now even the “context brain” for AI. In this year’s Magic Quadrant, Gartner finally names the split. And it changes how everything should be read.

Reading this year’s Gartner Magic Quadrant for Customer Data Platforms gave me a familiar feeling.

Not, not that of reading a short novel, with its 46 pages. Not excitement. Not disbelief. More the quiet recognition you get when something you’ve been circling for a while finally lands on paper. The conclusions didn’t come out of nowhere. They arrived right on time for the category.

For years now, CDPs have been asked to stretch in every possible direction. Think of them as the industry’s Spandex. One moment they’re a data foundation. Then an orchestration layer. Then

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

Posts tagged with customer data platform