Data Warehouse Platform vs. Customer Data Platform

By 2025, the amount of data generated, used, and stored worldwide is expected to reach 181 zettabytes, according to Statista. To put this figure in perspective, a zettabyte is equivalent to one billion terabytes, or a trillion gigabytes. With this kind of exponential data increase, it’s no longer about how much data anyone has, but about how to use it strategically. Let’s take a look at two prominent data storage solutions available to businesses today: data warehouse platforms and customer data platforms.

What Is A Data Warehouse Platform?

A data warehouse platform (DWP) is a type of centralized storage that receives large amounts of data from several departments, sources, and databases. These repositories resemble physical warehouses in that any data—whether customer information, financial data, transactions, tickets, and others—can be stored and organized.

Data warehouses store and catalog information in a structured format. This enables IT teams and data personnel to quickly access data and use it for analysis. However, while this fixed architecture benefits analytics, it limits the ways businesses can use data. It also favors certain types of information (such as structured transactions), which limits potential insights into customer behavior, business performance, and consumer trends.

While DWPs aren’t considered ‘new,’ they are a must-have for larger businesses and enterprises. DWPs offer secure, centralized storage where organizations can make sense of large amounts of data from different sources. However, due to its rigid architecture, a data warehouse platform requires extensive IT personnel oversight and offers a limited range of functions for businesses.

What Is A Customer Data Platform?

A CDP surpasses a data warehouse because it not only ingests and stores information but also makes data actionable for non-IT customer-facing teams. This alleviates dependence on IT personnel and makes it easier for marketing or sales teams to leverage customer data for personalized marketing campaigns, targeting specific persons and audiences, and evaluating sales performance.

Traditional data warehousing also requires periodic downtime and maintenance to load new batches of information. This makes it harder to ingest real-time or streaming data. CDPs, on the other hand, are built to ingest structured and unstructured data from multichannel sources including those that generate real-time, event-level, and streaming data. A CDP’s ability to use all types of information from multiple sources allows it to create unified, robust customer profiles that contribute to deeper consumer insights—a competitive advantage that is not easily replicated by rivals.

The purpose of a customer data platform is to centralize data for customer-facing initiatives across company departments, including marketing, service, and sales. It helps consolidate customer profiles, coordinate campaigns, enhance data security and privacy, and extract consumer insights based on analyses of a rich data foundation.

How DWPs And CDPs Can Work Together

The idea that companies must choose only one of these two data solutions is a false dichotomy. While a data warehouse differs significantly from a customer data platform, it can still work jointly with a CDP.

Because a CDP ingests all types of data from multiple sources and channels, it can export information from a data warehouse to enrich its own customer data foundation. A CDP can do the same thing with customer relationship management (CRM) systems and data management platforms (DMP). Using data from these external sources, a CDP connects the dots that enable marketing teams to personalize customer engagement across channels.

Let’s say a brand needs to identify a target audience for a new line of products. It can use information stored in a data warehouse platform, like historical purchases or periodical sales output, and combine it with information like customer behavior and activity collected by the CDP. The brand can then analyze the comprehensive data to predict which profiles are most likely to respond to a targeted product launch campaign within a given period. A CDP can also use the same information to create lookalike audiences, identify customers at risk of churn, and many other similar functions.

Without a CDP, the warehoused data remains inert for marketing purposes. But without information from the data warehouse, the CDP’s predictive results lack fullness and depth. Both tools complement one another and allow brands to get the most out of their data assets for optimal results.

Take Charge of Data Now With Treasure Data

Not all CDPs are created equally. Treasure Data Customer Data Cloud is an enterprise-grade customer data platform trusted by Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies around the world to simplify data complexity and create opportunities. Treasure Data provides insight by collecting and centralizing customer data, unifying profiles, and analyzing journeys to reveal hidden trends in customer behavior.

For larger businesses and organizations, Treasure Data’s enterprise Customer Data Platform checks the right boxes:

To learn more about how Treasure Data’s Customer Data Platform can work with your data warehouse platform, consult an expert today. Want to learn more? Request a demo, call 1.866.899.5386, or contact us for more information.