The future of Customer Data Platform(CDP) an interview with Michael Katz (mParticle)
Who is Michael Katz?
He was a founder and CEO of interclick, which took it public in 2009 and sold to Yahoo in 2011 for $270M. Also co-founder and CEO of mParticle, the leading Customer Data Platform helping the worlds best brands unify data across all consumer touch points to optimize marketing outcomes and customer experience (CX).
MParticle started in 2013 as a customer data platform for brands to accelerate growth. It improves marketing, advertising, and analytics by connecting data seamlessly across channels.
How we know him?
We as Data Scientists are working with different and various sources of data in #eCommerce and #Retail and develop a solution called Catwing, which helps us to make Data Science, structuring various data inputs, but soon we realize that there is a niche called #CustomerDataPlatform which we can keep eye on it and while we were researching we came up to one of the best videos explaining what is the Customer Data Platform(CDP) and why there is a huge area of development, presented by Michael.
Here is the video called “Data Management Platforms (DMPs) Are Dead Welcome To The CDP Era”
We contacted him and he accepted to make the interview revealing some of the latest trends in Data Management for every digital business in now days answering on questions about latest trends in CDP and what is the future for such technologies. Here is the script of the interview, good reading and thank you Michael for the respond and open-mindset 🙂
Can you tell us something about you, your background, expertise and of course your passion?
Born outside of Boston, been living in NYC for about 15 years and consider it to be home. I’m currently the CEO and one of the co-founders of mParticle, this is the second company I’ve started along with my brother Andrew, our CTO. The first company was in a different space but we built a data platform that was bleeding edge, and allowed us to grow significantly taking the company public before it was acquired by Yahoo in 2011. There were a number of learnings that helped form mParticle.
My passion is about company building, providing the best possible environment for incredible people to do amazing work and help customers solve business problems with data.
Why Customer Data Platform is the new era, can you share the most important top 3 reasons for you and why you started mParticle?
CDPs are the new era (of data platforms)! These challenges we solve are relatively new in nature and have been brought about by continued fragmentation of consumer platforms and vendor ecosystems. The reality is that there is more data that needs to be wrangled than ever before and unifying data, and subsequently improving ecosystem connectivity is a universal need.
Which are the main hurdles or challenges to implement CDP?
There is no one size fits all approach here, it’s highly situational and depends on resource availability, organizational maturity, level of sophistication, and existing systems in place. We walk all of our customers through an extensive Data Design process where we help them create and implement a coherent data strategy.
Can CDP automate marketers, at what scale and which activities?
The CDP should reside at the infrastructure level, as opposed to the application level. The main benefit is unlocking new and more efficient ways do things that were either difficult or impossible. If marketers want automation, there are lots of marketing automation applications like Braze and others but that’s not our job to do.
Future of CDP – what are your thoughts, whether it is technology, data models, new functionalities or new business domain which could be changed and why?
Well, I think what we’re seeing is right now, two companies are separating from the pack and are now universally considered the best in class. There are two companies (mParticle and Segment) and literally everyone else. When this happens the remaining companies will have a choice, they may try to differentiate on product, price, or distribution. What they do I really don’t care about.
Can you share interesting use case
Saving engineers time so they can build consumer facing features that move the needle on the business and empower the business to move faster doing things they normally couldn’t. Interesting enough? 😀
Conclusions:
We want to thank Michael for that great interview and we hope you enjoy it.
If you have any questions or comments use the section below.