The notion of a data centred application type called a Customer Data Platform (CDP) seems to be trending these days. A CDP solution is a centralized registry of all data related to parties regarded as (prospective) customers at an enterprise.
This kind of solution comes from two solution markets:
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
- Master Data Management (MDM)
The CRM track was recently covered in a Venture Beat article telling that Salesforce announces a Customer Data Platform to unify all marketing data. In this article it is also stated that Oracle just announced a similar solution named CX Unity and Adobe announced triggered journeys based on a rich pool of centralized data.
Add to that last year´s announcement from Microsoft, Adobe and SAP on their Open Data Initiative as told in the LinkedIn article Using a Data Lake for Data Sharing.
Some MDM solution providers are also on that track. Reltio Cloud embraces all customer data and Informatica Customer 360 Insights, formerly known as Allsight, is also going there as reported in the post Extended MDM Platforms.
Will be interesting to follow how CDP solutions evolve and if it is CRM or MDM vendors who will do best in this discipline. One guess could be that MDM vendors will provide “the best” solutions but CRM vendors will sell most licenses. We will see.
Liliendahl on Data Quality 
Does it still make sense to not have the Customer MD included in the CRM?
Good question Nadim. I think that many CRM systems today, unlike back in time, offers data quality functionality as for example deduplication either built in or via third party providers. But we still need MDM to relate to party records between CRM and ERP and other applications and even sometimes between several CRM instances.