What Is a Customer Data Platform?

Today, virtually every business is digital at some level. As a result, the number of involved systems and collected data is growing rapidly. The consequences are legal risks and a suboptimal customer journey.

What can be done? Enter the customer data platform (CDP).

The Need for a Customer Data Platform

It is not uncommon for a single business to gather and manage data on several different systems—like CRM, marketing automation, e-commerce, and billing.

Each system creates new silos of customer data and spreads sensitive and personal data across both organizational and geographical borders. This leads to a fragmentary overview of your customer data, and is an issue for both GDPR compliance and practical management.

Legal requirements demand, for instance, that any business must inform a user about the data they hold on them, as well as comply with the right to be forgotten.

A more commercial issue is providing the ability to deliver consistent communication and personalization across different channels, like websites, ads, and newsletters.

This is especially valid for larger organizations, as they have many customers and employees, and are cross-border—something which often leads to silos.

The Essentials of CDP

A customer data platform is a type of packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database accessible to other systems. Data is pulled from multiple sources, cleaned, and combined to create a single customer profile. This structured data is then made available to other marketing systems.

According to Twilio Segment's 2025 CDP Report, CDPs are increasingly integrating artificial intelligence to enhance personalization and predictive analytics.

This evolution allows businesses to build a complete picture of their customers on an individual level, collecting primary customer data from multiple sources—like transactions, behaviors, and demographics—resulting in a 360-degree customer profile.

This is also known as a single customer view and can be used by third-party tools for marketing purposes.

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CDP vs. Other Solutions

A CDP does not encompass every digital sphere. An identity and access management solution is, for instance, not the same as a CDP but can act as a source.

The main purpose of an identity solution is the authentication of users and authorization of allowed actions, and it is unnatural to place, e.g., transactions or a user history into such a framework.

However, transactions can be interesting for a marketing automation solution. Marketing automation focuses on tracking leads and sending messages, but this again is not the main focus of a CDP. Marketing automation can, however, be built on top of a CDP.

A CDP in itself does not perform marketing automation—it doesn’t send out personalized messages nor does it perform lead scoring. But there is some overlap.

A marketing automation solution is interested in gathering info and sending messages but is not as adept at sharing data and APIs. In a CDP, an API is a primary feature.

Identity, CRM, e-commerce, CMS, and marketing automation are typical systems wanting to own identity data, but a CDP is best suited to tie these systems together in a holistic package. This can help you comply with laws and improve the user experience.

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CDP Vendors

There are several CDP vendors on the market, including Exponea, Optimove, Emarsys, and Blueshift. Major players like Adobe and Salesforce have also introduced their own solutions, integrating advanced AI capabilities to enhance customer data analysis and personalization.

For instance, Salesforce's Data Cloud integrates seamlessly with its CRM tools, providing real-time insights and automation features.

Despite these advancements, integrating data across various platforms remains a challenge. Each source often requires custom integration, leading to new silos. This complexity makes it difficult and costly to switch CDP vendors or to build new solutions as needs arise.

The good news is that there is an effort to standardize CDPs.

Standardizing CDP

The OASIS Context Server (CXS) Technical Committee was chartered, among other things, to create specifications for a customer data platform and a context server as core technologies for enabling the delivery of personalized user experiences.

The committee aims to simplify management, integration, and interoperability between solutions providing services like Web Content Management, CRM, Big Data, Machine Learning, Digital Marketing, and Data Management Platforms.

Members of the technical committee on GitHub are producing a detailed list of use cases, a domain model, and a reference implementation to serve as a realistic example of how the standard can be used. A GraphQL API has also been published to facilitate standardized data access.

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Apache UNOMI

While OASIS contributes a standard, Apache Unomi is the first project to implement the standard in a product. The result is an open source, freely available customer data platform available for everyone.

Unomi serves primarily as a reference implementation of the CDP standard, providing practical insights into how the standard can be applied in real-world scenarios. It receives contributions from Jahia, Enonic, and others. Enonic also has a chair in the standard committee.

In December 2024, Apache Unomi released version 2.6.1, which addressed critical issues identified during migration processes. Notably, it resolved a bug related to the reindexing method, allowing it to be called multiple times without errors, and removed a hardcoded version of the log4j-extension to enhance logging flexibility.

These updates improve the platform's stability and adaptability in dynamic environments.

Future plans include efforts to offer more shrink-wrapped versions of Unomi, and—for Enonic’s part—hosting a Unomi instance and integration with Enonic.

First published 10 June 2020, updated 14 May 2025.