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Adobe brings CDP platform into GA, adds data governance to Experience Platform

Adobe steps up its offerings in the competitive customer data platform market as brands look for ways to coherently organize everything they know about their customers.
Written by Stephanie Condon, Senior Writer

Adobe on Thursday announced a series of enhancements to its Experience Platform, including new data governance capabilities and new tools to create more personalized customer experiences. Adobe is also bringing its customer data platform, a part of the Experience Platform, into general availability. 

Though relatively new, the customer data platform (CDP) market is a crowded, competitive space. Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce and several smaller software vendors are all offering CDPs for brands that are anxious to consolidate their customer data into one place where it can be easily leveraged. The need for CDPs has grown out of the increasing number of touchpoints giving brands new information about their customers. 



"A lot of customers out there have siloed, isolated products that have data that's valuable that they want to use to help inform their business," Ronell Hugh, head of GTM Strategy & Product Marketing for the Adobe Experience Platform, said to ZDNet. "Experience Platform brings in all that data, it helps to manage and standardize that data... And once you have that data standardized, it allows you to leverage it in unique ways." 

The Experience Platform is open and extensible, Adobe says, meaning customers can bring data from anywhere onto the platform via APIs. Within the Experience Platform, Adobe launched the beta version of its CDP in June. It offers dashboards, reports, AI and machine learning tools built specifically for marketers. Customers can import and leverage data in real time, whether it's data from CRM tools, offline POS systems or other sources. 

Meanwhile, the new data governance tools for the Experience Platform can help an organization ensure their data handling meets usage policies and regulatory requirements. The governance feature allows an organization to classify data, applying specific labels to the data based on their governance and compliance needs. It could be labeled as contractual data, for instance, or identity-related information. Once the data has been classified and usage policies have been set, the governance feature ensures data isn't leveraged in inappropriate ways. 

To help marketers better understand how to leverage their data, Adobe is also rolling out new Customer Journey Analytics tools within the Experience Platform that make it easier to gain insight from omnichannel data. The new analytics tools were inspired by Adobe Photoshop, which allows users to design with layers. Similarly, Customer Journey Analytics lets users layer data sets on top of each other. The tool leverages Adobe Sensei AI to automatically offer analysis and predict customers' future behaviors.

Lastly, Adobe is also adding new omnichannel journey orchestration tools to the Experience Platform, which can help deliver real-time, contextual experiences to customers. For instance, a hotel could create a geofence around its city to alert hotel managers when a guest is about to arrive, triggering specific experiences for that customer. 

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