Customer Data Platform Institute released its inaugural Customer Data Platform Industry in APAC report on 9th Oct 2020. Antsomi is proud to be categorized as one of the home-grown ‘specialist’ CDPs that has started in the region.

The report defined the home-grown ‘specialist’ CDPs as vendors who specialize in certain verticals. They pitch equally to large regional conglomerations, domestic enterprises, and smaller regional digital natives.
According to the report, Antsomi is an APAC-based specialist CDP vendor with key markets in APAC, including Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Philippines.

Dinh Le Dat (Dat) and Serm Teck Choon (Serm) also shared their views about the Southeast Asia market in the report. They think that “the market is big enough for many different players offering many different flavors, but vendors must be clear about their value niche.”

Below is detailed sharing from both Dat and Serm in the report:

CDP Adoption

Since 2014 -15, when DMPs started emerging as a new tech in the region, data maturity has evolved a lot. Large companies – banks, telcos, listed companies in SE Asia – that have embarked on a DMP journey over the last few years do have some big data solutions in place and a CDP is the next logical step for them.

For mid-size businesses (1000 or so employees), the last two to three years were about getting into ecommerce, and in COVID times, they are looking to build D2C capability. This will be a good prep for them to get into a deeper data maturity in the next few years.

The third group is smaller companies. Business owners are educating themselves by attending webinars and events around digital transformation but are struggling and need help. Many companies have built messy martech stacks, but as they adopt CDPs with delivery and campaign capabilities, they will start questioning duplication of capabilities on their stack.

Vendor Landscape

There are smaller startups who cater to different local and regional needs. There are some big US/European players. It is only natural that more will come as it grows, as it happened with DMPs five to six years ago. The market is big enough for many different players offering many different flavors, but the vendors must be clear about their value niche. There are also engagement and marketing platforms who have started talking like CDPs, and IT giants like Microsoft, Adobe, Oracle and Salesforce are also starting to be heard.

Vendor Challenges

The biggest challenge and opportunity is user readiness. The 360-degree customer view is just theory until there is organizational readiness, scale, and data cleanliness to make the most of a CDP. Irrespective of company size, the problem is that all the vendor noise pushes an ideal 360 view without stressing on the readiness and operational alignment needed to get there.

Even today, despite improvement in data maturity, we find large ecommerce companies struggling with siloed, channel-specific experience management focused on email or mobile.

Regional diversity is a challenge. Vendors have to factor in different levels of maturity, company stage, size, and location when understanding buyer needs.

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

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