Good morning, Marketer, and what do we mean by “composable”?
Craig Howard’s piece about “composable” CDPs is just the kind of thing we like to publish. It has a strong point of view, it’s well reasoned and neatly balanced between an overview of the topic and the deeper details.
But the point-of-view it expresses may be controversial. “CDP providers have been quick to… describe their platforms as composable,” he writes. “However, a tool itself is not composable. Architectures are composable.” That makes sense. For example, we recently wrote about a highly composable digital experience architecture.
CDP providers with composable offerings, however, negotiate that point by treating those offerings as part of an architecture which includes data lakes or stores created by IT to handle organizational data across the board (not just customer or marketing data). A composable CDP “plugs into” the architecture rather than existing as a separate, packaged solution. Here’s how ActionIQ describes it.
I’m just calling balls and strikes here. It wouldn’t be martech if we didn’t have a debate about terminology.
Kim Davis,
Editor at large
