A Customer Data Platform is defined by the CDP Institute as “packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems.” This unified customer database typically consolidates data from various systems within a business into a single, unified profile for every customer or prospect. A CDP will also usually provide identity resolution services which enable businesses to resolve multiple different identifiers to a single master ID. The CDP category is wide, but solutions typically provide functionality across one or more of data, analytics, marketing automation and campaign activation.

Both DMPs and CDPs contain customer data but they are different in 2 critical ways. Firstly, whereas a CDP should provide a single customer view of all your 1st party data relationships – both customers and prospects, DMPs only contain 3rd party data. It’s true that 1st party data can be onboarded to a DMP but only to match with 3rd party advertising cookies. Secondly, the DMP’s role in the MarTech/AdTech stack is to build highly targeted audiences ready for activation into paid media – Facebook, Google and programmatic advertising. A CDP has much deeper functionality and sits at the foundation of the MarTech stack to drive intelligent marketing in both owned and paid channels.

No, as 3rd party cookies are deprecated towards the second half of 2024, brands will need to switch from using DMPs to build marketing audiences to using CDPs to craft audiences based on 1st and 2nd party data. DMPs will become end of life at this time and will be retired from the AdTech stack.

Data collected directly by a brand is 1st party data – this includes customer records in your CRM, website visitors and data collected via promotional means. 2nd party data is data that is shared by a trusted partner, for example, a telecoms operator shares data with a handset device manufacturer for co-marketing purposes. Data that has been aggregated from other sources, by one of more organisations, with unclear provenance, is 3rd party data.

The Ikue CDP is designed by telcos for telcos and is the world’s only TM Forum certified customer data platform.

TM Forum is a global industry association for service providers and their suppliers in the telecommunications industry. Members include communications and digital service providers, telephone companies, cable operators, network operators, cloud providers, digital infrastructure providers, software suppliers, equipment suppliers, systems integrators, and management consultancies. The Forum has over 850 member companies (including the world’s 10 largest telecommunications service providers) that collectively generate US$ 2 trillion in revenue and serve 5 billion customers across 180 countries.

Whereas other solutions on the market cover many different vertical sectors, the Ikue CDP has been built exclusively for telecom operators. This means that we’ve built TM Forum certified connectors to commonly used telco applications such as Amdocs, Netcracker and Pegasystems which removes the need for costly integration effort. Robotic data automation maps data into a telco optimised data model which speeds up time to market and removes the need for endless workshops focused on source to target mapping. The embedded Marketing Toolkit provides access to over 50 industry leading use cases that cover the entire customer lifecycle from acquisition to retention.

By adopting the proprietary telco Marketing Toolkit of end-to-end customer lifecycle management use cases, Ikue helps accelerate your base management maturity and drive incremental value.

Ikue is a software as a service (SaaS) solution deployed on the cloud. By leveraging cloud capabilities, we can offer our customers a scaled solution that can manage very high loads at very low latency. Our customer state model provides a real time view of the customer state, and can ingest, process and distribute data to upstream applications in less than real-time.

The Ikue platform can be deployed in multiple regions to meet the client’s data sovereignty needs and latency requirements. Each client is deployed into an individual virtual private cloud (VPC) ensuring privacy and security of your customers’ data. Where a client wishes to deploy the platform on a multi-brand or multi-country basis then it’s possible to deploy as a multi-tenant solution within a VPC.

Ensuring that your customer’s data is safe is Ikue’s highest priority. Our solution adopts privacy by design principles meaning that data is protected by default. The platform provides security at all layers including tenant isolation, integration to all major identity management solutions, application firewalls and the adoption of a least privilege IAM strategy.