Salesforce Shines as CDP Leader in Gartner's 2024 Magic Quadrant
Salesforce has long been a dominant player in the customer relationship management (CRM) space, but the company has increasingly expanded its offerings into other areas of marketing and customer experience technology. One area where Salesforce has made a big push is customer data platforms (CDPs).
In Gartner's inaugural 2024 Magic Quadrant for Customer Data Platforms, Salesforce was recognized as a Leader based on its Salesforce Data Cloud offering. Let's take a closer look at how Gartner evaluated Salesforce's CDP capabilities and what strengths and cautions the analysts identified.
Salesforce's CDP Overview
Salesforce's Data Cloud is described as "a hyperscale data platform built on Hyperforce and integrated into the Salesforce platform, activating data across (and beyond) the Salesforce ecosystem." Some key points about Salesforce's CDP:
- It is designed to enable interconnection and data sharing between Salesforce solutions like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud to analyze and activate customer data.
- Recent enhancements include zero-copy data access with data lakes/warehouses and features to control data segregation for unified profiles, insights, and business units.
- The roadmap includes generative AI for segmentation, prediction, activation, and data graphs to visualize data models.
Strengths
Gartner identified several key strengths of Salesforce's CDP offering:
Multicloud Salesforce Customer Capabilities: The Data Cloud enables flexible interconnection among Salesforce solutions, addressing data management inefficiencies that previously required additional software or data transformation. This integration across the Salesforce ecosystem is a major strength.
Commitment to Ecosystem Innovation: Salesforce has a clear roadmap to innovate its CDP with emerging technologies like zero-copy data integration, bring-your-own AI/ML models, and generative AI through Einstein for engagement and activation. This commitment to innovation is a differentiator.
Strong Partner Network: Salesforce's extensive global partner network caters to clients of all sizes across industries and geographies. This includes ISVs building solutions on AppExchange, systems integrators for implementations, and resellers.
Cautions
While recognizing Salesforce as a Leader, Gartner also identified some potential cautions for prospective buyers:
Uneven Integration Approach: While Salesforce aims to improve leveraging customer profiles across its apps and cloud data warehouses, it has invested less in prebuilt connectors with non-Salesforce martech and data tools. Buyers with use cases requiring other third-party app access may need to use a paid AppExchange or MuleSoft solution.
Expertise Requirement: The Data Cloud is positioned as self-service, but it operates within Salesforce's complex ecosystem. Non-Salesforce customers or those lacking data talent may not benefit as much as existing Salesforce users.
Confusing Cost of Ownership: Salesforce's shift from a marketing CDP to the multifunctional Data Cloud makes estimating the total cost of ownership difficult. The consumption-based "credits" pricing model with workload multipliers suits enterprise operations but may be confusing for specific functions like marketing.
Other Evaluation Criteria
Beyond the specific strengths and cautions, Gartner evaluated Salesforce on a number of other criteria for both Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision.
On the Ability to Execute side, Salesforce received a "High" rating for its Product/Service offering, reflecting the robust capabilities of the Data Cloud. It also got a "High" for Sales Execution/Pricing and Customer Experience.
For Completeness of Vision, Salesforce earned a "High" rating for its Offering (Product) Strategy, demonstrating a strong roadmap and vision for the Data Cloud. It also received a "High" for Market Understanding based on its grasp of current and future customer needs in the CDP space.
Some areas that may have held Salesforce back included a "Low" rating for Marketing Execution, suggesting more opportunities to improve market visibility and messaging. It also received a "Low" for Geographic Strategy, potentially due to a heavier focus on its core North American and European markets.
The Bottom Line on Salesforce's CDP
Overall, Gartner clearly views Salesforce as one of the leading players in the CDP market with its Data Cloud offering. The tight integration with Salesforce's other cloud solutions, commitment to innovation, and extensive partner ecosystem were highlighted as key strengths.
At the same time, some of the cautions around integration with non-Salesforce tools, required expertise, and potential cost confusion are important considerations for prospective buyers - especially those without an existing Salesforce footprint.
For companies already invested in the Salesforce ecosystem or those looking for a tightly integrated, innovative CDP solution, Salesforce is absolutely a vendor to seriously consider based on Gartner's assessment. However, those with heterogeneous martech stacks or more limited data/marketing expertise may want to weigh the potential tradeoffs.
As the CDP market continues to evolve, it will be interesting to see how Salesforce executes its innovation roadmap and vision for the Data Cloud in the years ahead. However, this inaugural Gartner Magic Quadrant has clearly established Salesforce as one of the leaders to watch in this fast-growing space. Want to learn more?