Gartner CDP: Does Gartner Have a CDP Magic Quadrant?

People often ask if Gartner has a Magic Quadrant for Customer Data Platforms (CDPs). The answer is no—Gartner does not have a CDP Magic Quadrant. But there are Gartner reports and other resources that are helpful if you want to see how a leading analyst firm categorizes the vendors in the CDP market, or you wish to understand where the vendors fit into these well-known quadrants:

• Niche Players
• Challengers
• Leaders
• Visionaries

We’ll guess that you’re also making the business case for a CDP investment. Or, you’ve made the business justification and are looking to assemble a preliminary list of solutions. If you’re further along, perhaps you have an initial list and want to narrow it down to a shortlist.

In this post, we’ll provide you with resources to build the business case for a CDP and determine how to select the right vendor.

Build the Business Case for a CDP (2018)

Marketers looking to build a business case for a CDP (for their own management and leadership) can look at this Gartner blog post by contributor Chris Pemberton. Titled “Make the Case for a Customer Data Platform,” Pemberton’s post details how marketers can convince business leaders to invest in a customer data platform. The sections of the post are:

• Develop an effective executive summary
• Use metrics and examples to detail unmet needs
• (Quickly) articulate your ideal vision
• Compare potential solutions
• Detail implementation and success measures

Pemberton published a related blog post, “The Marketer’s Guide to Customer Data Platforms” and Gartner published a research report with a similar title, “A Marketer’s Guide to Customer Data Platforms” (Note: registration and/or a Gartner subscription may be required to access the report).

Also in 2018, Gartner analyst Benjamin Bloom published a blog post, “Smart Hubs vs. Dumb Spokes: CDPs and the Undiscovered Country.” In the post, Bloom lists the CDP attributes sought after by multichannel marketers:

• Storage
• Unification
• Analytics
• Orchestration

According to Bloom, “Vendors that accomplish the above could be smart hubs, implying that the spokes of the final mile don’t need to be so brainy,” since a CDP could serve as the brains instead. Bloom published a related report, “Smart Hubs and Dumb Spokes — A New Approach to Multichannel Marketing” (Note: Gartner subscription may be required).

Treasure Data has also published a guide to CDPs, as well as a guide and template to create a request for proposals (RFP), including a list of more than 200 questions to select for inclusion in CDP RFPs.

Gartner’s Market Guide for Customer Data Platforms (2020)

A year after putting CDPs into the Marketing Hype Cycle, Gartner published a Market Guide for Customer Data Platforms from analysts Benjamin Bloom and Lizzy Foo Kune (note: a Gartner subscription may be required to access this guide). The report contains these sections:

• Overview
• Strategic Planning Assumption
• Market Definition
• Market Description
• Market Direction
• Market Analysis
• Representative Vendors
• Market Recommendations
• Gartner Recommended Reading

In the market guide, Gartner notes that interest in CDPs remains strong. Client inquiries about CDPs doubled in the first half of 2018 and remained steady since then. According to Gartner, the market forces driving interest in CDPs are:

• The need to sustain a 360-degree view of the customer
• The desire of marketers to have autonomous tools that are purpose-built for their use case
• The desire from marketers for extensible platforms
• The belief from marketers that CDPs are an investment worth planning for and protecting in an economic downturn
• A growing interest from consumers and regulators in how brands use customer data
• The realization from marketing technology teams that they’re unprepared for data stewardship realities

To help readers understand the CDP vendor landscape, Gartner designates four CDP vendor types:

• Marketing Cloud
• CDP Engines and Toolkits
• Smart Hub
• Marketing Data Integration

Treasure Data is designated by Gartner as a Smart Hub CDP.

According to the guide, “These vendors emphasize marketing orchestration and personalization that by nature require both granular customer data analytics and controls for event-triggered and planned campaigns or journeys.”

When deciding whether or not to deploy a CDP, the Gartner guide recommends asking these questions:

• Is the CDP the best technology to solve our problem?
• Do I have a large amount of individual-level data?
• How will we govern and protect customer data?
• Who will own — and manage — our CDP?
• How can you align to your integrated suite or best-of-breed martech strategy?
• What data will go into our CDP?
• Do we have the skills in-house to deploy the CDP?

Gartner Peer Insights

According to Gartner, “Peer Insights is Gartner’s peer-driven ratings and reviews platform for enterprise IT solutions and services covering over 300+ technology markets and 3,000 vendors.” Peer Insights provides a Customer Data Platform category page listing 20 vendors, including Treasure Data.

Every review on Peer Insights is verified by Gartner to ensure that reviews are authentic. While this site does not include direct commentary from Gartner analysis and does not have anything resembling the Magic Quadrant, you can browse CDP vendors, read customer reviews and even compare one vendor with another.

Visit this Peer Insights page on our site to read featured reviews of Treasure Data’s CDP.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Management Solutions for Analytics.

Since you asked about Magic Quadrants, we’ll mention that we’re listed in an MQ for a related category, Data Management Solutions for Analytics. Gartner evaluated 19 vendors based on their completeness of vision and ability to execute, and our Customer Data Platform (CDP) was one of the selected few that were included. Read more in our blog post, “Treasure Data Recognized in 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Management Solutions for Analytics.”

Treasure Data Customer Data Platform Makes Waves in RTIM Space

While it is true that there is no Gartner Magic Quadrant for CDPs, Forrester Research has covered several categories in which Treasure Data CDP has been included. For example, because real-time capabilities have proven to be key in keeping up with changes in demand and customer behavior, Forrester Research recently introduced a new report: The Forrester Wave™: Real-Time Interaction Management, Q4 2020. The company conducted a 30-criterion evaluation and identified the 13 vendors that “matter most” in real-time interaction management (RTIM). Forrester Research states “RTIM is personalization done right,” and in its first entry in the evaluation, Treasure Data Customer Data Platform (CDP) was named a “Strong Performer.”

RTIM integrates customer data, content, and channels with sophisticated decision engines to personalize customer experiences.

In the evaluation, Treasure Data received the highest possible score in six criteria—digital intelligence, customer profiles and preferences, analytics management, predictive analytics and machine learning, digital advertising, and performance.

Forrester Research noted that “Treasure Data’s CDP provides scalable customer data ingestion, and its Treasure Boxes provide an extensive library of packaged analytical models with ‘white box’ configurability so users can customize and tune them to specific business objectives.”

Across the board, Treasure Data’s customer references cited ease of use as a key benefit and one reference added “The UX gives marketers access to underlying analytical complexity that is beyond most martech vendors.” The report also stated “Treasure Data offers a good solution for firms looking for a CDP with built-in analytics to drive next best experiences.”

TrustRadius Category Page on CDP

TrustRadius is a review site for business technology products and services. The site helps technology buyers make better product decisions based on unbiased reviews. TrustRadius manages a category page for Customer Data Platforms (CDP). On this page, you can learn about CDP vendors, including company description, pros and cons (i.e., as specified by reviewers), overall vendor ratings and ratings of key features.

We’re proud to hold the #1 position in the TrustRadius CDP category and to have the designation of “Top Rated award.” According to TrustRadius, “Top Rated awards help distinguish products in a category that have excellent customer satisfaction ratings. TrustRadius issues Top Rated awards each year in every category on our site.”

Top Rated awards are based solely on customer reviews, with no paid placement. Vendors need to meet all three of these criteria to be considered:

1. Recency: Product must have 10 or more recent reviews (from the past year)
2. Rating: Product must have a trScore of 7.5 or higher
3. Relevance: Product must earn at least 1.5% of the site traffic in the category

Learn more about CDP vendors at TrustRadius.

Bottom Line: No Gartner Magic Quadrant for CDPs—BUT There Are Plenty of CDP Resources

So while it’s true that there’s no Gartner CDP MQ, Gartner has published a number of materials and reports discussing CDPs, as has Forrester Research. More recently, CDP customers have weighed in at TrustRadius.

You can also visit CDP Case Studies to learn how CDPs are helping companies worldwide to customize customer journeys, provide customer analytics, and help with marketing tasks such as targeting and segmentation, targeted personalization, data unification, single customer views, customer analytics, and campaign orchestration.

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