According to David, the formal CDP Institute definition of a customer data platform is, “packaged software that builds a persistent unified customer database that’s accessible to other systems.”
‘Packaged’ software means it’s something you ‘buy’, it is not a data warehouse or a data lake that you typically ‘build’ as a custom project.
“Unified persistent customer database has multiple components to it,” David says, “It’s unified as it takes in data from all sources. This means it doesn’t just work with some subset of data.”
A customer relationship management (CRM) system, for example, will