Out-of-the-Box or Custom CDP: Which One Fits Your Business?

Customer data platforms: building a custom one vs. buying a vendor solution. Learn about the advantages and obstacles of both implementation approaches.

Customer relations, customer journey, customer tracking … Shouldn’t there be a way to bring these ingredients together for a blockbuster marketing attack?

What Is Customer Data Platform (CDP)?

CDP solutions have settled in the analytics market just recently. Their architectures are quite diverse, and it’s mainly their purpose that unites them under that umbrella definition.

From a technical point of view, CDPs are data lakes, data pipelines, and business intelligence tools at the same time, but tailored solely for marketing purposes. In their core functionality, CDPs are customer data hubs that feed marketing channels with discovered insights.

CDP software, or more often, a CDP cloud solution, works with both first-party and third-party data. It can consume web, app, and event tracking data and contact and past campaigns data from your CRM, as well as marketing data that you buy from an external provider.

Why Do You Need a CDP?

Once the data is ingested, the CDP provides analytical insights to use for further customer segmentation. Depending on the vendor, CDPs can also assist in tag management and website personalization. They can handle bigger data volumes than other marketing technology solutions.

Moreover, their USP feature is identity resolution: de-anonymization of the customer data.

Although most of the CDPs don’t have functionality for sending out newsletters or booking online ads; they do provide a ground for marketing outreach. For instance, a CDP can build a single customer view, which is an ultimate dossier on a client that specifies their buying behavior and past touching points with your brand.

Out-of-the-Box vs. Custom Solutions

There are quite a few CDP vendors competing heavily. Consequently, one may think that a custom CDP is a must. This isn’t completely untrue.

In fact, like with any other software, you have to balance between expected business value, available resources, and possible risks. Companies with dedicated developer teams choose to build custom platforms. Indeed, their stakeholders have to lose one or two years while they create these platforms from scratch.

As a reward, custom CPDs provide advanced integrations that won’t miss any precious drop of customer data. Quite often, matching offline and online visits means lots of trouble for a generic CDP solution.

If you need results quickly, don’t hesitate to get an out-of-the-box CDP. For instance, you feel that the market turned favorable for your business. Then you’d better start digging into your customers’ profiles immediately with a ready CDP solution.

A Nice Alternative

“You cannot have both!” is not the case here. You can use a hybrid approach to introducing a CDP. It’s possible to buy an off-the-shelf solution and keep only the core features, like data pipelines, identity match, and intuitive user interface for marketers. Customizing the rest with your in-house developers may turn affordable.

If not, and you have to hire more people, consider buying a few niche CDP solutions. it can get messy, can’t it?

Thus, before you commit to any solution, create a thorough plan for CDP implementation and set your priorities.

How to Plan a CDP Implementation

Any good IT project starts with a few workshops you hold with your most important stakeholders. During these rounds, you should gather prerequisites and expectations for the future CDP—incoming data you have and what kind of output data your marketing channels need.

After that, you can begin by evaluating the integration. Answers to the following questions will shape the future project direction:

The technical concept must reflect your business goals and enhance existing workflows, but remain realistic. If existing out-of-the-box CDPs barely match with it, you need a custom one.

The planning stage predestines your project to success or failure. A competent implementation partner, such as Laminar, foresees possible challenges and helps you stay on the right track to roll out a revenue-generating CDP solution.

Doing business in the cloud creates competitive advantages and cost-savings opportunities. Learn five success factors to deploy a cost-efficient cloud strategy.

If you’re not doing the majority of your business in the cloud, you’re likely missing competitive advantages and cost-savings opportunities. More than 93% of enterprises are using a multi-cloud strategy, while 87% have a hybrid approach combination on premises.

Spending on cloud services and infrastructure increased 34% last year and it’s not stopping. Digital migration and transformation continue to be at the top of most business agendas worldwide in 2021.

Five Success Factors for a Cost-Efficient Cloud Strategy

A well-designed cloud application framework is the key to deploying successful cloud solutions. When you have the right infrastructure, your business runs smoothly, whether you have employees working on premises, remotely, or in a hybrid situation.

We employ these five core principles as part of designing a cloud cost optimization framework.

  1. Define Operational Objectives
  2. Reliable and Redundant Systems
  3. Secure Cloud Storage
  4. Efficient Resource Management
  5. Cost Optimization Cloud Services

Define Operational Objectives

The first step in creating a robust, reliable infrastructure to manage your data, apps, and business needs is to define your operational objectives. The better you understand your needs, the better you can optimize your investment. For example, keeping nonsensitive data in a public cloud while reserving sensitive data and mission-critical applications for the private cloud can help keep costs down.

It takes a careful analysis of your business use-case to determine best practices for your organization.

Besides determining your needs, your cloud strategy should also include:

Reliable and Redundant Systems

Downtime is not only a productivity killer, but there’s a financial cost as well. Gartner estimates that unplanned downtime costs an average of $5,600 per minute. That can range from $140,000 to more than half a million dollars per hour, depending on organizational size.

System monitoring, redundant systems, cloud connectivity, and automated backups are just the starting point for building a resilient IT architecture.

Secure Cloud Storage

When moving data to a cloud infrastructure, two-thirds of IT professionals say their most significant concern is security. A well-designed cloud application framework deploys best practices for security with a separate security layer.

Your deployment should include a focus on employee education. 99% of cloud security failures happen on the customer end and not with the cloud provider, according to Gartner.

Efficient Resource Management

Just making the move to the cloud won’t solve your business problems. It takes a holistic approach to develop your infrastructure, applications, IT, and resources to create an optimal environment.

Cost Optimization Cloud Services

Nobody wants to spend more than they need to get the results they’re after. One benefit of the cloud is that you pay for what you’re using now with the flexibility to add more capacity when necessary. Other cost optimization strategies include:

Rightsizing your computing services and optimizing them can be tricky. For example, there are more than 1.7 million possible combinations for cloud administrators when it comes to sizing instances.

Get Expert Help to Optimize Your Cloud Costs

If you don’t have the internal skills you need, the personnel to design your IT architecture, or the capacity to manage it, you’ll benefit from an expert set of eyes to help guide you.

When it’s time to figure out how to optimize cloud costs, experience can make a significant difference.  Contact the technology enablement experts at Laminar for a free consultation to see how you can optimize your cloud costs while futureproofing your business systems.

Learn how to modernize your business applications and achieve high flexibility with the hybrid cloud approach

When you start to hear about delays, broken schedules, and unresponsive servers in your company, it’s time for a digital transformation.

And even if everybody talks about clouds, you may be cautious about moving your entire IT system into a cloud. We want to suggest a reliable compromise: a hybrid cloud approach.

What Is the Hybrid Cloud Approach?

The hybrid cloud approach allows you to use the synergy of on-premise and public cloud solutions. With a hybrid cloud, some workflows run on your private server or on-demand private cloud, whereas others run in a public cloud.

You can shift workloads between your private computing resources and cloud environments, distributing them efficiently.

The workflows, or rather the applications that incorporate them, talk to each other using different methods—mostly the APIs. The collaboration between applications located in separate environments is enabled through virtualization and containerization technologies. They wrap up each software and make it feel native on any platform.

Role of DevOps in This Approach

Although a hybrid cloud infrastructure comes with management software to steer the workflows, you should have a development operations (DevOps) engineer on your side. Cloud DevOps keeps track of all existing private cloud solutions and public cloud services, maintains them, and prevents conflicts and counterproductive resource utilization. This person or team) monitors the integrity of single applications and their performance.

In addition, DevOps coordinates deployments to ensure the completion of development life cycles: costly and risky projects with a lot of dependencies.

Why Move Toward the Hybrid Cloud Approach?

Public cloud services outscore their stationary private counterparts by many factors. Once your company begins growing, you suddenly need to speed up your workflows on short notice and without any cost explosion.

But you may still prefer to keep the most sensitive data on a server physically located in your office building. At the same time, you may implement applications that require quick response and scalability through cloud deployment.

If all above is the case, then the hybrid cloud approach may be the best option.

Modernizing Your Business Applications

Migration to cloud technology is a perfect chance to upgrade your existing applications. You can replace legacy ones running in your data center with native cloud applications. Many providers offer out-of-the-box solutions for enterprise resource planning, logistics, customer relationship management, and much more.

Apart from this, you can stick to custom-developed applications and let them breathe freely with the power of edge computing.

Three basic options are available for modernizing your applications:

The right way is always unique for your business.

How to Achieve Flexibility With the Hybrid Approach

As mentioned before, with a hybrid cloud approach, your workloads aren’t rigidly bound to either cloud or private servers. You can move them between environments, sparing resources and preventing system overloads and database crashes.

Flexibility means reliability. If you can orchestrate your capacities and deliver your customers what they need and when they need it, you’ll become a reliable business partner.

Hybrid cloud architecture won’t restrict you from performing secure, authorized deduplication: a procedure for tidying up your data storage. And it works with confidential data that can’t directly match with other methods.

You will find a lot of advice saying you should move to a cloud model. But what you really need is a precise understanding of cloud computing, your business needs, and the intersection between them.

Laminar has a proven track of successful cloud migrations and can demarcate for you a reasonable migration scope and support you by its implementation.

You’ve heard of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), but may not be familiar with XR. Learn about XR technology and how it’s used across industries.

You’ve heard of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), but you may not be familiar with XR. Let’s start by explaining what it is and then look at use cases that are being adopted.

What Is XR?

XR stands for extended reality. It’s a catch-all phrase that includes such technologies as augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR), and virtual reality (VR). This tech is being infused into software that can run on devices, including cell phones and tablets.  Three key areas are rapidly gaining momentum.

The market for XR to create immersive environments is growing quickly. It’s already a $12 billion market and expected to grow to $72 billion by 2024.

How Augmented Reality Works

Augmented reality is one of the most popular uses today. While virtual reality creates a digital simulation, AR works by adding digital content into real-world environments. It might use a live camera feed, for example, or augment what you’re seeing with additional information. It’s being used in remarkable ways with significant results.

XR and Training Apps

XR apps have revolutionized training experiences in many industries. Companies are using it to model real-life situations to visualize case-specific applications. XR apps allow workers to train safely in situations that otherwise might be high-risk, such as practicing surgical operations, working with high-voltage switching, training pilots, or rehearsing military operations.

It’s also being used by retailers such as Walmart, which claims VR training boosted retention in associates by 10 to 15%. They even used XR training apps to simulate the in-store chaos of Black Friday.

Trainers report that XR training apps help people focus better on the task at hand. Many enjoy the gamification aspects built into the simulations.

XR and Sales Apps

Customers today are looking for a more immersive experience. When they’re at a physical store, they can touch and hold a product. Online, not so much. They’re looking to replicate that in-store experience when shopping online. They want to see how products look in their home before buying them or how they might look with personal care or fashion products.

XR sales apps and cell phone XR apps can enhance the experience by letting them better visualize how products fit their lifestyle. It can enhance sales. As much as 47% of consumers said they’re more likely to engage with products using immersive technology, especially if it can provide personalized recommendations. As high as 61% said they’re more likely to buy after using XR tools.

XR and Collaboration Apps

XR collaboration apps allow multiple people to work on projects at the same time. Using XR collaboration tools, conference calls or video calls can become significantly more productive. As multiple people can visualize situations in AR or VR, participants can work together toward a common goal or find solutions.

Workers could annotate the live video of remote workers or interact with shared 3D virtual objects. Such uses have been shown to improve performance and reduce mental effort.

Technology Solutions to Enhance Your Business

XR is just one of the ways businesses are enhancing the training, collaboration, and sales experiences for their employees and customers.

If you’re looking for technology solutions to improve your business, contact the technology experts at Laminar today.

Laminar specializes in creating streamlined technology that drives solutions for your business. We integrate tech with your business goals to automate operations and execute your vision.

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