News from Krux, Demandbase, Radius: Customer Data Takes Center Stage

If Dreamforce seems a little less crowded than you expected this week, perhaps it's because I didn’t attend. But I’m still tracking the news from Salesforce and other vendors from my cave in Philadelphia. Three announcements caught my eye, all highlighting the increasing attention being paid to customer data.

Salesforce itself had the biggest news yesterday, with its agreement to purchase Krux, a data management platform that has expanded well beyond the core DMP function of assembling audiences from cookie pools. Krux now has an “intelligent marketing hub” that can also load a company’s own data from CRM, Websites, mobile apps, and offline sources, and unify customer data to build complete cross-channel profiles. Krux also allows third party data owners to sell their data through the Krux platform and offers self-service data science for exploration and predictive models. The purchase makes great strategic sense for Salesforce, providing it with a DMP to match existing components in the Oracle and Adobe marketing clouds. But beyond the standard DMP function of generating advertising audiences, Krux gives Salesforce a solid customer data foundation to support all kinds of marketing management.  In particular, it goes beyond the functions in Salesforce ExactTarget, which was previously the designated core marketing database for Salesforce Marketing Cloud. To be clear, there’s no campaign management or journey orchestration within Krux; those functions would be performed by other systems that simply draw on Krux data. Which is exactly as it should be, if marketers are to maintain maximum flexibility in their tools.

Demandbase had its own announcement yesterday: something it calls “DemandGraph,” which is basically a combination of Demandbase’s existing business database with data gathering and analytical functions the Spiderbook system that Demandbase bought in May 2016. DemandGraph isn’t exactly a product but rather a resource that Demandbase will use to power other products. It lets Demandbase more easily build detailed profiles of people and companies, including history, interests, and relationships. It can then use the information to predict future purchases and guide marketing and sales messages. There’s also a liberal sprinkling of artificial intelligence throughout DemandGraph, used mostly in Spiderbook’s processing of unstructured Web data but also in some of the predictive functions. If I’m sounding vague here it’s because, frankly, so was Demandbase. But it’s still clear that DemandGraph represents a major improvement in the power and scope of data available to business marketers.

Predictive marketing vendor Radius made its announcement last week of the Radius Customer Exchange.  This uses the Radius Business Graph database (notice a naming trend here?) to help clients identify shared customers without exposing their entire files to each other. Like Spiderbook, Radius gathers much of its data by scanning the public Web; however, Radius Business Graph also incorporates data provided Radius clients. The client data provides continuous, additional inputs that Radius says makes its data and matching much more accurate than conventional business data sources. Similarly, while there’s nothing new about using third parties to find shared customers, the Radius Customer Exchange enables sharing in near real time, gives precise revocable control over what is shared, and incorporates other information such as marketing touches and predictive models. These are subtle but significant improvements that make data-driven marketing more effective than ever. The announcement also supports a slight shift in Radius’ position from “predictive modeling” (a category that has lost some of its luster in the past year) to “business data provider”, a category that seems especially enticing after Microsoft paid $26.2 billion for LinkedIn.

Do these announcements reflect a change in industry focus from marketing applications to marketing data? I’m probably too data-centric to be an objective judge, but a case could be made. If so, I’d argue it’s a natural development as marketers look beyond the endless supply of sparkly new Martech applications to the underlying foundations needed to support them. In the long run, a solid foundation makes it easier to dance creatively along the surface: so I’d rate a new data-driven attitude as a Good Thing.