The Best Data Management Solutions: The 2024 CRM Industry Leader Awards

The Market

Emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence are adding large amounts of data to business systems every minute of the day, amounting to dozens of zettabytes every year. In a rush to aggregate all that data for analysis, companies often neglect the quality of the data collected from these various sources. IBM estimates that businesses in the United States lose $3.1 trillion yearly due to poor data quality.

That’s where data management platforms (DMPs) come in. DMPs collect, organize, and activate customer data from various online, offline, and mobile sources. They then use that data to build detailed customer profiles for targeted advertising and personalization. In a nutshell, data management is the backbone of digital marketing, helping companies better understand their customers.

Research firm MarketsandMarkets expects the global customer data platform market to grow from $4.8 billion in 2022 to $19.7 billion by 2027 at a compound annual growth rate of 32.4 percent. Several factors, such as increased spending on marketing and advertising and a changing landscape of customer intelligence, will drive this growth of the market, according to the firm.

The Top Five

Adobe has several customer data offerings, but its main ones are the Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform (CDP), a single system for customer data management across the customer life cycle, from prospect to frequent, loyal buyer and beyond; and Audience Manager, which lets users collect, analyze, and segment data from various sources, including websites, mobile applications, and connected devices, to create detailed and personalized audience profiles based on behavioral and demographic data. Both are part of the larger Adobe Experience Cloud and work with other Adobe marketing products to create unified customer profiles ready for marketing and sales cross-channel activation.

Informatica has been at the forefront of the data revolution for the past two decades and sustains that position today with its Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC). Launched in 2021, IDMC is an AI-powered, end-to-end data management platform offering 200-plus intelligent cloud services that enable companies to visualize, analyze, and collaborate with their data regardless of location or platform. It is a single cloud-native platform enabling companies to connect, access, consume, and govern data wherever it flows. Andy Hayler, cofounder and CEO of the Information Difference, calls Informatica “the market-leading data integration vendor with broad data management capabilities.”

Oracle got its start in the database realm, so it only makes sense that the company would be a leader in the data space, but the company has a lot more going for it than tradition and a long standing. Its Oracle Data Cloud, composed of technologies developed organically and gained through several acquisitions, has an unmatched ability to improve marketing outcomes. Add to that the Oracle Unity Customer Data Platform and you’ve got a complete portfolio capable of transforming customer data into intelligent insights that can then be used to make the most of every marketing opportunity.

Salesforce’s data management efforts are largely centered on Data Cloud, though they also draw from technologies from divisions like Tableau, Mulesoft, and Hyperforce, among its data management portfolio in the Customer 360 platform. Data Cloud is deeply embedded in the Einstein 1 Platform, which means any external data lake or warehouse can now drive actions and workflows inside CRM systems. Users can bring in data from their favorite apps using more than 200 connectors, powered natively by Data Cloud or offered through MuleSoft’s Anypoint Exchange, making Salesforce’s offering among the most versatile in the industry, according to analysts.

SAP, like Oracle, has deep roots in the data sphere, and its full slate of data management products is proof of that. The German company offers a wide range of data warehousing, cleansing, preparation, governance, analytics, reporting, business intelligence, and compliance tools, all built on a solid SAP HANA cloud database and analytics foundation.

Niche Players

Analysts this year identified Experian as a key niche player in the data management solutions market, noting that it is a data quality behemoth that is now expanding into data governance.