Oracle CX Unity Looks Like a Real Customer Data Platform

I finally caught up with Oracle for a briefing on the CX Unity product they announced in October. Although it was clear at the time that CX Unity offered some version of unified customer data, it was hard to understand exactly what was being delivered. The picture is now much clearer. Here are straight answers to important questions:

It’s a persistent database. CX Unity will ingest all types of data – structured, semi-structured, and unstructured – from Oracle’s own CX systems via prebuilt connectors and from external systems via APIs, batch imports, or Oracle’s integration cloud.  It will store these in well-defined structures defined by marketing operations or similar lightly-technical users.  The structures will include both raw data and derived variables such as predictive model scores. Oracle plans to release a dozen industry-specific data schemas including B2B and B2C verticals.

It does identity resolution. CX Unity will support deterministic matching for known relationships between customer identifiers and will maintain a persistent ID over time. It will link to the Oracle Identity Graph in the Oracle Data Cloud for probabilistic matches using third party data.

It activates data in near real time. CX Unity can ingest data in real time but it takes 15 to 20 minutes or longer to standardize, match, run models, and place it in accessible formats such as data cubes. Oracle expects that real-time interactions and triggers will run outside of CX Unity.

It shares data with all other systems. Oracle has built connectors to expose CX Unity data within its own customer-facing CX Cloud systems. APIs are available to publish data to other systems but it’s up to partners and clients to use them.

It integrates machine learning. CX Unity includes machine learning for predictive models and recommendations. Results are exposed to customer-facing systems. This capability seems to be what Oracle has in mind when it contrasts CX Unity with other customer data management solutions that it calls merely “database centric”.

It’s not live yet. The B2C customer segmentation features of CX Unity are available now. The full system is slated to be available in mid-2019.

These answers mean that CX Unity meets the definition of a Customer Data Platform: packaged software that creates a unified persistent customer database accessible by other systems. The machine learning and recommendation features would put it in the class of “personalization” CDPs I defined earlier this month. This is a sharp contrast with the CDP alternatives from Oracle’s main marketing cloud competitors: Customer 360 from Salesforce (no persistent database) and Open Data Initiative from Adobe, Microsoft and SAP (more of a standard than a packaged system).

It's likely that CX Unity will be bought mostly by current Oracle CX customers, although Oracle would doubtless be happy to sell it elsewhere.  But even if CX Unity sales are limited, its feature list offers a template for buyers to measure other systems against. That will create a broader understanding of what belong in a customer management system and make it more likely that buyers will get a CDP that truly meet their needs.  So its release is a welcome development – especially as Oracle finds ways to present it effectively.