Top 10 Trends in Customer Data Platform Industry in APAC

The inaugural “Customer Data Platform Industry in APAC” report, which was released by Customer Data Platform Institute, has provided a comprehensive coverage of the customer data platform industry in APAC.

The top 10 findings of the report are summarised below:

1. Growth in the global context: From mid-2019 to mid-2020, they see only marginal increases in employment and new vendors in the region and little funding for regional CDP startups. With several major European and US-based CDPs actively invested in APAC, as well as an increasing share of voice from global and regional IT majors that are adding CDP capabilities to their portfolio, it’s unlikely that this can be attributed to a lowering of interest for CDP solutions in the region.
2. Growth of regional vendors: The number of APAC-headquartered CDP vendors grew at a healthy pace in 2019, up to 15 in by the end of 2019 from just five vendors at the close of 2018.
3. Funding and employment growth patterns: Funding in the region remained flat while CDP employment grew from 588 employees in mid-2019 to just short of 1,100 by the end of 2019.
4. Focus on campaign and delivery CDPs: In the APAC region, delivery CDPs grew fastest on all parameters – number of companies added, funding and employment – followed by campaign CDPs, analytics, and finally data CDPs.
5. The vendor landscape is still emerging and can be broadly categorized as:
   • Non-APAC based ‘specialist’ CDPs such as Segment, Tealium, and Treasure Data. These are active in the region, focus on the largest early adopters of full-spectrum CDP.
   • Home grown ‘specialist’ CDPs that have started in the region. Examples include Lemnisk (BFSI), FirstHive (Retail and CPG), Lexer (Retail), The Data Team (BFSI, telecom), and Antsomi. They pitch equally to large regional conglomerations, domestic enterprises, and smaller regional digital natives.
   • ‘CDP inside’ players (companies that added CDP to existing systems). These are global enterprise IT players such as Microsoft, Salesforce and SAP, and regional enterprise IT players such as Netcore and Manthan. They expanded their portfolio to include CDP capabilities, and go after all verticals and all sizes, including enterprises, growth companies, and ‘digital natives’ including funded startups.
   • Smaller home-grown CDP-like solutions that focus on delivery and campaign capabilities and may or may not describe themselves as CDPs at present.

6. Regional diversity: The Indian, Australian, Far Eastern, and Southeast Asian markets are each at very different stages of data maturity, market investments, and formulation of data privacy regulations.
7. The impact of privacy and regulation: In the APAC region, while many countries are working on their privacy laws and regulations, there is no overarching law driving a privacy-first approach, although there is growing focus, especially in BFSI. Privacy concerns also prompt a preference for on-premises cloud models or in-house data foundations, especially in data-sensitive industries such as BFSI and healthcare.
8. Barriers to growth: The biggest barrier to CDP growth in this region remains the ongoing confusion about choosing the right solution between different products claiming similar outcomes. Data maturity and readiness, skills gaps, organizational silos, unclear privacy laws, channel-focused strategies for mobile-first markets, do-it-yourself approaches, lower resource costs, and the intense pressure for quick ROI are other challenges to full-spectrum CDP growth.
9. Opportunities for growth: Growing digitalization and on-going focus on big data, data analytics, and martech will have a positive rub off on CDP capabilities. Accelerated by COVID 19, the scale of the shift to mobile digital channels, balanced by traditionally strong offline models, is powering interest in CDPs as a strategic data management platform.
10. Impact of COVID 19: A renewed urgency for digitization of business has caused faster decision making and lower red tape. But financially-stretched businesses tend to choose use-case based solutions (such as e-commerce solution) to address urgent needs, due to lower cost and faster time to value.

If you are interested to learn more about the customer data platform market in APAC, download the CDPI APAC report via the link.

Antsomi