The CDP Redux: Category Creation to AI Fragmentation, with Dale Renner, CEO of Redpoint Global
- Apr 6
- 53 min read
The CDP isn’t dead—but it’s definitely not what it used to be.
In this episode, Rio Longacre and Brett House sit down with Dale Renner, CEO of Redpoint Global—and one of the earliest architects of the space—to revisit the rise, fragmentation, and uncertain future of the CDP.
From helping shape the first-ever CDP deal to navigating today’s fractured landscape, Dale unpacks what actually happened—and where things went sideways.
They get into:
Why the category splintered across identity, segmentation, and activation
The real tension between marketing, IT, and data ownership—and why most CDPs failed to bridge it
How “everyone became a CDP,” turning the category into a mile-wide, inch-deep mess
Why many companies ended up with multiple CDPs—and still didn’t solve the problem
The hidden truth: without high-quality data and identity, personalization is just noise
And most importantly—what comes next.
As AI reshapes the stack, Dale makes a clear bet: The future isn’t vendor-built platforms or pre-packaged agents.
It’s data readiness, composable architectures, and company-owned agentic layers—built on top of systems that can actually handle identity, scale, and complexity.
Because in the end, this was never about CDPs. It was always about the data.
Read Full Transcript Bellow:
Brett House (00:01)
Welcome back to Signal and Noise with my co-host Rio Longacre. I am Brett House. ⁓ We are, for those that have not listened before on No BS Media franchise, decoding data, tech, and AI and the marketing transformations that actually matter. ⁓ Today, we are ⁓ thrilled to speak with Dale Renner, the CEO of Redpoint Global. He's been in the CDP space, excuse me, customer data platform space, since before it was called. a CDP, I think it might've been called the DMP or there were other solutions in market ⁓ at the time. Yeah, other acronyms, tag managers, all sorts of things that evolved into this space. He's seen the category of merge, mature, fragment, and now collide head on with AI. ⁓ Dale, great to have you on the show. Thanks for finally joining us and would love for you to introduce yourself to the audience.
Rio (00:35)
Other acronyms.
Dale Renner (00:56)
Sure. Great. Great to be here. Thank you. My background is I was 21 years at Accenture. was global managing partner of CRM and had about there about 5000 people in the group practicing CRM or doing CRM work and about one and a half billion in revenue. was then I left and became the CEO of a company where we built our own in-memory computing platforms and had about 20 billion records on people in United States, worked under the FCRA and Greenleash-Villali. to basically create a picture of a person for background checks, law enforcement, got involved in Homeland Security after 9-11, sold that company to Alexis Nexus. Then I got involved with a company in the UK, and that was back on the commercial side. It was more of an MSP. We wrote our own selection software, and that basically sat on top of some data engines, data quality and identity resolution engines. Focused mainly on ⁓ wireless ⁓ and ⁓ banks and then two years later sold that to Experian in the UK and then started Redpoint in 2006.
Brett House (02:09)
Yeah, ain't...
Rio (02:09)
But that was definitely early. Yeah, that was like before, I mean, I think I started first doing work that where customers are asking for CDPs, maybe 2014, 2015-ish, I think it started emerging. So you were definitely early to the game and yeah, we're thrilled.
Dale Renner (02:24)
You're not trying to call me old, are you?
Brett House (02:26)
What did call yourself when you first launched? Yeah, what did you call yourself when you first launched? wasn't, because I don't think the category even existed in 2000.
Rio (02:27)
Well, seasons, right?
Dale Renner (02:28)
Let's season. I am a seasoned person.
No, it didn't. It didn't. In fact, when we launched in 2006, didn't have any, we had to wait for two years to get the software guys out of the lockup over in the UK. And so we just kind of fell back on our backgrounds and we were just working in the customer space and we got lucky. Started in May, sold our first deal in May and in August we landed AIG and started working with them and worked with those guys for 20 years or whatever. then things just kind of took their place. And in 2008, we started February, I guess March of 2008, we started developing software. We went into the market at the end of 2010. I acquired a company at the end of 2011 that gave me my data engine. We focused on what you guys would think of as the, in the olden days, we called it campaigns, right?
And that gave me two of my three pieces. And then the, and then the insight piece we created, we adapted machine learning, started working with machine learning probably back in, geez, I don't even know, 2015, 2016, something like that. But, Redpoint was founded on a principle of, I always call it the three ball swirls. And my marketing people went crazy because they thought it was, don't know what, didn't work, but it was, it was the virtuous cycles of a virtuous cycle of mastering your data, driving insights from those data, taking action on those insights, every action, more data, more data, better insights. That was the virtuous cycle of those capabilities. That was my vision for the company. When we went into the market, when we finally got all of our three components in one form or another, ⁓ I called it the Convergent Marketing Platform. ⁓
Brett House (04:17)
Yep. Yep.
Dale Renner (04:37)
And I actually still have contracts in place that refer to that. We've done a pretty good job of maintaining relationships with our customers over the years. Anyway, so it was a convergent marketing platform, but it didn't really roll off my tongue very well. Back then, you had multi-channel campaign management at Gartner. We had cross-channel campaign
Rio (04:57)
Well, you could have gone with CMP, right? But I guess that consent management kind of mixes up with that too though.
Dale Renner (05:00)
Well, we
Brett House (05:01)
Yeah.
Dale Renner (05:02)
probably probably we probably tried that who knows right ⁓ but but in in in there's maybe too much history or I don't know but but it's kind of my evolution has been interesting because because I actually have to go all the way back to 1993 with and I'll come back to the point that I was just going to explain but 1993 I was friends and friends with Martha Rogers, so Peppers and Rogers, who you guys probably don't even remember Peppers and Rogers, but they wrote the book on one-to-one marketing, right? That was future, right? And so, and the whole premise of that book was really about, the premise of their thinking was about ⁓ getting share of customer versus share of market. So it was...
Rio (05:37)
One to one marketing, yeah.
Dale Renner (05:56)
everything about the customer. And the idea was work with your top 20 % of your customers to expand inside those customers, as opposed to going out and getting mass, trying to get mass market. Now, you know, there's all kinds of strategies, you know, there's the Porter stuff and all those other kinds of things. And I Michael Porter from way back and, and, but, but, but we, but we, ⁓ but, but we actually built, I built a product called customer service direct when I was at Accenture.
Brett House (06:04)
Yep.
Yeah. Microporter. Yep. DMBA class.
Dale Renner (06:25)
And it was based on the principles of one-to-one marketing. And we actually generated a half a billion dollars of consulting revenues over that little package that we built over, you know, was back in power builder and we had to deal with the memory leaks and all that kind of crap. But, ⁓ but ⁓ that ⁓ I always liked that. I like those principles. And that's what I built Redpoint on. ⁓ What was that concept of, of how do you get, how do you help companies get share of customer versus thinking about acquisition and all those things. There's nothing wrong with that, by the way. ⁓ We have clients who use our platform for that. So when we came, so now I'll come back to what I saying. So when we did this thing, to me it was this convergence of these capabilities. The problem that I had though is that who do I talk to about that? Because Gartner had data quality and they had multi-channel campaign management and they had all these different pieces, right? What I was doing was swimming, I guess, against the tide. Right, I was swimming against the tide because it was this idea, no, you got to have all these capabilities. So in 2013, I actually paid David Rab, who at that time was focused mainly in data warehouse and I paid him $10,000 to write a report on, and I,
Rio (07:29)
They still haven't figured it out.
Dale Renner (07:49)
I spent time with David on this customer data platform idea. I've never really enjoyed my experience with analysts, right? But one thing I did learn, right, is put yourself on a chart and people will come, right? And so...
Rio (08:08)
They're definitely not pay to play though, right? Definitely not.
Yeah, they do.
Dale Renner (08:16)
So I asked him to just rank me at the top of the chart on the CDPs and it was like lattice and a bunch of these companies and notice and a bunch of these guys that have been acquired or long ago gone. A few of them are still around, but the report, should send you guys the report. could get a kick out of it. Yeah, I'll send it to you. So, so I spent this and I funded the company for the Redpoint for the first six years.
Rio (08:32)
I'd love to see it, yeah.
Brett House (08:33)
Yeah.
Dale Renner (08:40)
⁓ and foolish me, didn't pay myself because why would I pay myself with my money to only pay taxes? That didn't make any sense. So I thought it was the biggest waste of $10,000 ever because nobody called. And I pushed this, we pushed this thing out and we waited and waited and In 2015, early 2015, got a call from Microsoft and it was Microsoft, the Azure guys, and they were working with a company called.
Rio (09:05)
Well, and this is when Cloud had really started taking off around this time too.
Dale Renner (09:08)
Right.
So Azure was they were selling to Keurig, right? Green Mountain Keurig. And ⁓ so they called and they said, hey, we're selling to, we're working with this company called Keurig. And they want this thing, they want this thing called a CDP, a customer data platform. And they pointed to, they showed us this report and you guys, the leader in that report, in the CDP space And so I said, sure, we would love to talk to him. And so in June of 2015, we closed what I believe is the first CDP deal ever. And the buyer of that is a fellow named Ryan Scott. He was the vice president there. and we and we sold the CDP. And that is and that is how CDP came about because nothing else.
Brett House (10:00)
Well, you heard it here, folks. mean,
Rio (10:00)
Okay, yeah, so here, yeah, it's like this is, yeah, this is where it came from. Yeah, yeah, we want to see that report, but that is, that's a cool piece, cool piece of history.
Brett House (10:02)
the first CDP deal ever. We'll have to that offline, but...
Dale Renner (10:05)
Yep. You can. I'll even show you the contracts with the dates. I'm happy to do that because, you know, I don't tell that story often, but it's kind of a fun story. mean, is, you know, it's just kind of a fun story. So.
Rio (10:24)
Yeah, that's a cool story. So, Dale, just to cut, cut, cut you off for a second here. So, I mean, that's really, that's awesome. And that's kind of the thing, what we wanted to dig in here, because there's like the CDP category. There's been a lot of talk about it recently. had, ⁓ Matthew Niederberger on our podcast about, was it about a month ago, Brett, where we talked about the recent Magic Quadrant report, circling back to analysts, right? We've had, I've written a couple of articles that, that went kind of semi-viral recently with like the four pasts of the, of the CDP and then like, Where's the category going, right? It's been under a lot of pressure. First, you had composability and you know, which kind of broke the category apart. You've had, know, prices have kind of collapsed. mean, it's been, it's been, there's been a lot of change and a lot of flux, which not necessarily bad thing. Martex always changing, but you could even argue the category is kind of fragmenting and falling apart, right? As like, do we even compare and contrast like a monolithic, a Salesforce data cloud or Adobe experience platform to like a high touch, which is, know, just as reverse ETL, right with very light identity resolution. So it's like, how do you even compare and contrast, compare apples to apples at this point? It's the categories become sprawling, it's fractured. So the history here is really interesting. So we'd love to maybe talk, get your perspective on it and help us understand the narrative and maybe think about where, based on the past, where's the industry going?
Dale Renner (11:44)
Yeah. Well, you know, this is just my view. But the mistake, I think, in CDP, I thought about it. All right. hate to make I think I made one mistake. Right. But no, I think the mistake in my thinking on it at the time is that, you know, I read the same nonsense you guys read from IBM back in 2017, 2018 about how the CMO was going to have the budget power and the CIO is going to take a step down and that all that.
Brett House (12:15)
Yeah, the CMO's got a bigger tech budget than the CIO or CTO. Yeah.
Dale Renner (12:18)
Yeah, exactly. Right. Well, the problem with the CDP is in my vision, not I'll come back to other people. But in my vision, the problem is there are ⁓ multiple different buyers. Because you have, know, we we tend to sell to technical people and we do when we do really well when we're selling to quasi-technical buyers, not even on the marketing side. Because remember, marketers used to be very technical, right? They wrote, they wrote SQL, they wrote to do selections. They didn't have all the software, mean, Unica, right? You basically wrote code to do selections inside of Unica. So, but that has changed over time. Now marketers, you know, they're looking for the easy button, right? And what I think, what I, and that doesn't,
Brett House (13:12)
and being required to become Claude Code and OpenClaw experts.
Dale Renner (13:14)
Yeah, mean, they don't have to do that, but they want somebody to do that. I think what happened with CDP is that there ⁓ were too many buyers and too many people that came at the problem from different angles. So the IT guys, what are they worried about? Well, they've got the marketers and they're banging on them about having this great data. They have to worry about security. They have to work you know, with with their constraints of their architectures and their databases. Now we've got cloud. Now you got budgets. You got all these things that they have to worry about. Marketers don't care about that. Right. The marketers would be happy to, you know, do all kinds of selections and and let me see. You know, I'm looking for 10000. Oh, I got 250000 or I got 2 million. Oh, I got to, you know, I got to run this thing again, run this thing again. In meantime, I'm paying based on consumption. Right. And this thing's and this thing's running up a bill. That's not my problem. That's an IT problem. On the other hand, you've got the marketers, like I said, they're looking for, you that's why you look at all these silos and back. don't know what it is today because I kind of have lost interest in it. But at one time, you know, there was like 13 different marketing packages that marketers use and all those kinds of things. There's overlaps and had to be rationalized, blah, blah. But it didn't matter because you.
Rio (14:31)
So Dale, it's like the tension between IT and marketing and marketing ops and then maybe legal, right? It's all there, right?
Dale Renner (14:37)
Right. It's all that. There's a conglomeration. Yeah, there's a conglomeration of all those people. Thank you. ⁓ And so
Rio (14:42)
You're selling something for marketers, like, let's face it, like they're not doing this without IT because the data is going to come from somewhere. Someone's got, know, I mean, IT, are the stewards of the company's data, right? That's like, they're the ones who are accountable for it.
Dale Renner (14:53)
Well, that's right. And, And in my experience, I always tell my sales guys, if IT is not involved in this, don't do it. Let's not do it because it's going to be a problem because you've got to get anxious.
Rio (15:02)
Well, that was a problem with like the SAS sprawl, right? Where marketers, there was a period where I think they started doing that, right? They started like around that time. Oh, let's get a credit card. We'll do this. We'll get, you know, we'll get an ESP. We'll get a CRO, but then that's a problem, right? And I think, I think what I've seen it kind of the pendulum swing both ways where marketing will have more, more purview to do these things. And suddenly I T said, hold on, like, we can't have this. There's, too much sprawl. We need more consolidation. You know, we, we're going to get, we're going to get in trouble maybe even with these privacy laws. So I know it cuts you off.
Brett House (15:30)
What?
Dale Renner (15:30)
Yeah.
Brett House (15:31)
Yeah.
Dale Renner (15:31)
No, no, that's right. No, problems. But I think this the second there's there's probably a couple of different issues. That was my shortcoming and thinking about that, thinking about who the buyer was going to be and how, know, how that would work. And and so we had to learn to kind of we had to learn to work through that. The second one is the disappointment, which is one of my guys was at an event recently and we were just talking about it the day and he said, you know, remember that event that was over in the UK and the he was sitting in the audience and the speaker said, how many people have a CDP? Right. A whole bunch of people raises their hand, the vast majority. And OK, how many people have a second CDP? A whole bunch of hands stayed up. Right. And so the the point is the disappointment, I think.
Brett House (16:18)
Yep.
Dale Renner (16:26)
in CDP, which adds to problem, is that people don't understand what they're buying. I don't mean that in any kind of, they're not smart people or whatever. My point is I'm a marketer and I want to do something where I want to do hyper personalization for a term. OK, great. Do you care how good the result is? Well, of course I do. Well, then you've got to have really good data. Do you have really good data?
Rio (16:29)
There's a lot of that. Yeah.
Brett House (16:30)
Yep.
Dale Renner (16:55)
Well, that's not my problem. No, but it is your problem. Because if your strategy is that you're going to drive hyper personalization on an omni-channel basis, how are you going to do that?
Rio (17:03)
Or even defining what hyper personalization is. And people throw these terms out, Like, we've never even achieved one to one marketing, right? I don't even know if we need to, right?
Brett House (17:07)
Yeah, what does that really mean?
Dale Renner (17:10)
But
Brett House (17:11)
Yeah. Well, yeah. And we worked at Newstore, you know, at Newstore, we worked at Action, with Action IQ and their challenge was they're trying to do, you know, activation at scale, but they didn't have the identity resolution play. And so we came in with the identity resolution data play to ensure that they were normalizing and de-duplicating and hygiene-ing their data. But to your point, the CDPs had multiple definitions.
Dale Renner (17:12)
you see the problem.
But that, excuse me, but that was, but wasn't that really from a, wasn't that really from an ad tech standpoint and driving in, going from anonymous and driving in. So what about all the first party data? How is that going to get used and what are you doing to do that? Right. And so, so then you get into identities and, know, and, you know, we work with, we work with a number of the fortune 50 companies, fortune 20 companies and you know,
Brett House (17:47)
Yep.
Yeah.
Dale Renner (18:05)
When they do identities, they're not looking to do some hard key match ⁓ on some ⁓ email address that's been ⁓ hashed, right? And so we both know who that is. And so ⁓ that's how they do it. They want to know the identity, the household, who's in the household, and they want to know the connection to the business. So you have a multi entity ID. Well, that's what there ain't anybody in the market better than us at doing that.
Brett House (18:16)
Cached. Yeah.
Yep. Yep.
Dale Renner (18:35)
Now, if you don't need that, if you're just pushing ad tech, well, then maybe you don't need all that stuff. That's my point. It isn't that that makes us bad and someone else good or the other way around. It means we're not right for that problem. If that's all you want to solve. the other hand, if you want to solve the problem I just outlined, then probably there are very few people that can actually do that. But if you bought their thing thinking that they're going to do that, you're going to be disappointed.
Brett House (18:51)
Yeah, and you may-
Yeah.
Yeah, well, no, and you made that point in your LinkedIn post about a financial services company, I think, that you were selling into. And they actually had two CDPs that were handling different use cases. And you came in for the identity resolution use case and one other. Yeah, segmentation, segmentation scheme and activation. Whereas the other CDP was doing the same thing. So suddenly you get this bifurcation of, or more than just a bifurcation of what the category actually is.
Dale Renner (19:16)
Segmentation, audience.
Brett House (19:29)
And you're kind of, I think you start to move further away from the actual client use cases and you're saying, hey, we're solving these hard problems that this other category player that's also labeled CDP cannot solve. So why are you both called CDPs?
Rio (19:42)
Well, yeah, I've seen that too, Brett. Like I've
Dale Renner (19:42)
Right.
Rio (19:44)
seen like people bringing the CDP just for segmentation or bringing it just for, you know, just for activation. like, so, so like, mean, the category it's hard to, it's hard to even say it's one category anymore, but like, but yeah, one thing I do want to ask you about too. around, around the time you referenced, like we were, we were doing a lot of work with vendor selections and a lot of healthcare clients, especially you guys are coming up a lot. Like we even did three or four implementations with you guys. And then like And then you kind of fell off. Like what happened? What did the market change? Did you miss read the market? Was there a category shift? you know, love to maybe talk about, you know, I think between like 2016 to 2020, like I think things changed a lot. It did seem to impact you guys. Love to hear your perspective on
Dale Renner (20:26)
Yeah, well, I think probably, I've got to think about this because in 20, when did COVID happen? 2020? Okay, so 2020, 2021 and 2022 were our best growth years ever. And it was all about digital transformation. Remember that? Everybody was doing digital transformation.
Rio (20:36)
2020, yeah.
Brett House (20:36)
Yeah, yeah, right in the beginning of 2020. Yeah. Yep. yeah. Yeah, we...
Rio (20:49)
Oh yeah, everyone needed a CDP all of a sudden because everyone like...
Brett House (20:52)
Yeah.
Dale Renner (20:52)
Well, everyone needed to work through multiple channels, didn't they? And how do you do that? Because if you think about it, that was kind of the third problem, by the way, which is organizational, which is back in those days, email guys were measured by hearts off bounces, opens and click throughs, right? And so they're still measured that way. ⁓ So what does that have to do with personalization or optimizing the relationship or whatever? Nothing. So, ⁓ so I think that probably in those
Brett House (20:55)
Yeah.
Dale Renner (21:21)
In those teen years, think we were probably, we had sold to a number of big companies. And I think honestly, we, probably were just consumed by that. And we still are working like right now we're working with a bunch of big companies that have our software and we're part of their whole AI strategy.
Brett House (21:42)
And were you, were
you during that period, were you making any platform product to either replatforming or technology changes? Or was it, you were just, was it a positioning play? Cause cause you know, I'll agree with Rio is that Redpoint, ⁓ wasn't particularly visible, ⁓ in the CDP market from what, from my vantage point, we were partnering a ton of people at Newstar. Like I mentioned, Action IQ, RIP, Treasure Data, a whole bunch of these guys. ⁓ I don't think I ever saw Redpoint come to the surface. And so.
Dale Renner (21:49)
Yeah. Yeah.
Brett House (22:11)
Was it a category specificity that like the high governance categories like financial services and healthcare? Was it product pivoting that you were doing?
Rio (22:20)
Yeah, I know you've hosted a more of hosted solution versus cloud for a while too. So yeah, I curious to hear your take on that.
Dale Renner (22:25)
Yeah, so a bunch of things. So we've lived through multiple technical or technology transitions, right? Because remember, when we started building, know, web, web, you eyes were not being created for anything complex is it was kind of like, you know, web one dot or maybe one, one dot five or something. So you couldn't do anything complex and you couldn't debug anything like a marketing applicant. That was very difficult. So we had to do we did that all through client server. And so And that gave us the engines to be able to process, because we went after enterprise. So we went after scale and performance and complexity. That's what we were focused on, right? People who, interesting companies having interesting ⁓ users who are trying to do hard things.
Rio (23:14)
What was the average deal size?mean, I guess it's like, cause at that time segments started taking off, you know, they'd claimed to have the biggest CDP market share, but they were doing really small deals. Right. And even know, and I think that kind of markets even collapsed now recently. mean, like, I think high touch, you know, I heard rumors they were doing deals for like $25,000. Right. So, so curious, like if you're focused enterprise, these must be bigger, like immediate engagements. Right.
Dale Renner (23:34)
There were were multi-million dollar engagements, software deals. Right. And so we had we had a very high we call ACV because we were not we were not an assas. So ARR is something you would see in SAS. We had annual contracts or multi-year contracts. You know, you pay annual in advance. That's that's how that's how our deal structures work. And but then what we had to do is we had to figure out. And the other thing is, is that we work a lot in regulated industry.
Brett House (23:47)
Yeah.
Dale Renner (24:03)
So, you know, ⁓ we do retail work. In fact, know, ⁓ in IDC's latest, ⁓ they called it, I think, was CDP for retail. We're ranked a leader in that, right? But we do really well in regulated industries because there's a lot of complexity. You need to be very specific about who these people are.
Brett House (24:16)
Okay.
Yeah.
Dale Renner (24:33)
You need to be, you you've got, you've got sock to type two requirements. got HIPAA compliance. Yep. You got all those things going on and.
Rio (24:39)
Kepa. A lot of the early CDPs were on HIPAA compliant. I think Adobe never was. They wouldn't sign BAAs. know, definitely healthcare is its own unique beast.
Dale Renner (24:48)
Yeah, yeah, we've got them all over the place,
right? And we've got them all over the place.
Brett House (24:50)
Yeah. And to pass all those tests and go through that sort of diligence process with these companies, and we did it with financial services at Newstart, became a moat for us because it was so laborious and time consuming and people heavy to actually just get through that process. And once you were approved, ⁓ you had a little bit of defensive ability against your competition.
Dale Renner (25:12)
Well, you to your point, I mean, we actually have clients come to us and say, hey, we want to work with this one company, right? We want you will you contract with them because there's no way they're ever going to make it through our process ever. Right. We don't make it through. Now with this the size of people right now, you know, you can go through a nine month sales cycle, a 10 month sales cycle and you and you think you're you're all done. And then this.
Brett House (25:25)
Yeah, it's gonna take too much time. They probably won't pass. Yeah.
Rio (25:39)
You're at the one yard line, right? But you're not. But you're not.
Dale Renner (25:40)
The size of people's stuff. And you got it. You're going now you're jumping through all the hoops again. So what I would say is, is that in those 2016 to kind of 2019 ish, we we had done some very big deals and, know, and it was hard. mean, we took on a lot. Right. Yeah. And so and the other thing, too, you know, back, I can't remember when they did the.
Brett House (26:01)
All consuming.
Dale Renner (26:10)
When did they do the multi-channel marketing hub at Gartner? guys remember that? Yes. So we were a leader in that. We were a leader in that category, right? And it was...
Rio (26:15)
Just around that time. Yeah, just around that time.
Brett House (26:15)
Yeah, yeah, it was it was yeah 2015 2016. Yeah
Yeah.
Rio (26:26)
But I thought that category made no sense. had like, like totally disparate companies. I'd like, you know, like Adobe was in there, Salesforce, I don't know. ⁓
Brett House (26:29)
Yeah. Well, we, you know, I was, yeah. I, Xcelate our data management platform. I was talking to Andrew Frank on like a daily basis and as he was running that and you're right. It was like, I couldn't make sense of it, even though we were applying for it. I just saw it as an opportunity to be recognized sort of in the, in the management platform space. Yeah.
Rio (26:48)
Right. There was that. Then there was the CRM. So we'll deal. Maybe this begs the question. these already and this reports any like, are they valuable still? Like, do you think like, I mean, it drives business to your point, but like, are they like, is it worth it? Like, what do think?
Dale Renner (26:51)
You would be... Yeah. Well, no, I don't know if it does drive business. think that I think what it does is ⁓ I think it bifurcates the market and maybe it maybe there's even more separation in the market. I you've got the big guys, right? And and I'm not going to accuse anybody of manipulating process and all that kind of stuff. but you they're they're always why is it the same guys are still always in the, know, in the way far right. And and the thing is, I was a
Rio (27:20)
Because that doesn't happen, right?
Brett House (27:20)
⁓ yeah, yeah, there's a way to game the system. We've reverse engineered it.
Yeah.
Dale Renner (27:30)
I was a consultant a lot. I know how this stuff works. I don't know everything, we work with all kinds of partners, know, all the big GSIs, they're all partners of ours. And so I hear all the horror stories, but you know, big brands like to buy from big brands until that big brand can't satisfy the need. Then you get an opportunity. So when I look at these, when I look at the
Brett House (27:51)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Dale Renner (28:00)
And I have a different issue with Gartner than I have about these reports generally. ⁓ My issue is, well, my issues, I just think they don't understand. They've lost, I think they've lost their, people who, analysts who used to be there or in those roles, those people understood, they dug down, they ask you hard questions. They wanted to see stuff. You know that what
Brett House (28:07)
Yeah.
Rio (28:09)
I really want to hear this by the way.
Dale Renner (28:30)
I've spent three years now trying to explain to the Gartner people how data plays in this. But what do they do? They think of it as data collection and unifying, you know, unifying the ⁓ unified profile. Okay, fine. How are you unifying that profile? What is that? Is it a is it doesn't go back to an email match? Is that what you're doing? But then what's
Brett House (28:50)
Yeah.
Rio (28:54)
There's a deterministic model based on email. Yeah, I I mean, it's very
different than some of it is like a probabilistic model where you're using fuzzy matching, right?
Dale Renner (29:00)
Yeah, very different. Right. Right. So, so when I when I started my argument with those guys probably back in the late teens 2018 2019 because my argument was always because we're data first. That's what we are. We come at this. We come at everything with the data, data, data. Exactly. We always think about data. And so my point to them was when they were doing the multi-channel campaign management matrix, then I said, you know,
Brett House (29:15)
Yeah, you call yourself a data readiness platform, right?
Dale Renner (29:29)
How do we get to be a leader? Right. And the answer is always the same, which is, that shouldn't be your goal. Your goal should be to do that. I said, no, how do I get to be a leader? And it was like, you have to have more, you know, that marketo stuff, because marketo was on the on the chart back then. Right. And so and so I said, so content, content, content, that's what you use content. I said, no, we're not content. We don't do content. We're stupid. Why would I go do content? Well.
Rio (29:45)
Remember that,
Brett House (29:45)
Yeah, marketing innovation platforms. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and the fact that they conflated you with a marketing automation platform doesn't make any sense at all.
Dale Renner (29:59)
But I said, what I can do that they can't do is create context. I deliver context and you can use that context across the enterprise, whether you use my interaction products or someone else's campaign price, you got to have context or content is a waste of money. That was my argument, right? Well, I fell on deaf ears with those guys.
Brett House (30:23)
Yeah. Yeah.
Dale Renner (30:28)
But IDC understands it. ⁓ Spark group, these people, understand that. So I think that my problem started on the CDP thing several years ago because they always told me, we value the data thing, but then the charts would show up and then data would get short shrift. And so I would work it again, work again. And I finally just got to the point where I said, you know, I feel like this is a complete waste of my time.
Brett House (30:30)
Yeah.
Dale Renner (30:56)
You know, you guys, we've offered three times to do a deep dive on our software over the past 12 months. This is before this last evaluation. And you guys don't, you don't want to do that. So I don't know how you're evaluating anything anymore. I don't understand it. And I don't understand the definition because it feels like it's a mile wide and inch deep. And so everybody, if you can spell CDP today, you are a CDP. It's just that simple. So I said, I just don't want to do this anymore. I just think this is just a waste. We have to do these questionnaires. We have to build a demo. We do the demo remotely.
Brett House (31:35)
Yeah, it's a couple of people's FTEs full-time job for a little while.
Dale Renner (31:38)
Right. And it's just, and I just got, I just got fed up with it. And I just said, I'm out. I'm tagging out. And if you guys, you know, want us to come back. they did. But then I wrote, I wrote a protest letter that they were covering us because I said, you, you guys didn't, you, how did you find out any information on us? And so, and so they said,
Brett House (31:47)
And they reserve the right to cover you whether you opt in or not.
Yeah. So
they had put you in the report ⁓ somewhere in that quadrant and you were like... Yeah.
Dale Renner (32:02)
Yeah. I protested because I didn't participate. Right.
Rio (32:03)
that you didn't fill out the questionnaire.
Dale Renner (32:08)
And then they, and then they said to me, well, we have, we, we, we've got public information. said, well, that's really interesting. Can you tell me where you got the public information? Because I'm a, I'm a privately held company and I, and you guys don't, I don't, I don't believe, I don't believe, ⁓ you've got to your website. So I went to the website and I said, tell me every place that Gartner went on my website. I want to know from, from my guys.
Brett House (32:24)
Yeah. Yeah.
Dale Renner (32:31)
And the stuff that you would look at would be case studies. We have a ton of case studies out there, right? And the case studies, if you read a case study, you can discern from the case study what you had to do to drive the value that you're talking about. Well, they landed on the front page of the case studies but did not look at one case study.
Brett House (32:53)
Yeah, there's nothing you can tell from a case study that's sort of in a slide or on a website without speaking to the client.
Dale Renner (32:56)
So what?
Rio (32:58)
plus like the, plus even the way their questionnaires work, like, like we had, like, like when we talked to a bunch of people about that, like there, there are people who like the relationship you have with them previously, yeah. Well, you were helping advise them on what goes into questionnaire. mean, like these questionnaires are designed a certain way to get a certain response, right? Apparently the last one they had questions about like agent force and things like that, which I think it's not surprising Salesforce ended up in a far right. Right. If you, you, if you have questions that are designed a certain way. So again, not, not blame me anyone, but I think these people to your point probably don't know the category very well. You're asking for help from vendors they're friendly with, and it's probably how the whole thing happens. But I guess like, I mean, maybe looking ahead to, mean, like, like, you know, not to belabor the point of magic quadrants, because I think we all agree they're not probably not as great as they were, but like, where are things going? Right. I mean, AI is changing things. It's, mean, it's, you know, the, the, the, the category changed a lot with composability, right? I think it changed a lot with cloud.
Dale Renner (33:41)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Rio (33:53)
It changed a lot with like when Composability broke apart identity resolution from segmentation, from activation, from analytics. mean, we even had Peter Berger, remember he even said, I don't think analytics belongs in a CDP at all. Right. So, so it's really, really evolved. Like, like with AI, where do you see things going? Like what, what is the feature of the category? What are you doing?
Dale Renner (34:12)
Yeah. Okay, great. Thanks for the question. First of all, I agree that I don't understand analytics being in the CDP either because there are so many analytics, great analytics tools. Why wouldn't you just use the best of breed of analytics tool and feed the data? I don't get that. don't get it. or plop that on top of an image of in Snowflake, you would just create another segment basically of the data to use. But ⁓ where we're going is this. I think that if you're in the agent piece, and there's the agent and the platform, guess, right? I mean, that's an interesting way to look at it. It works. The platform, I think, will become a very big thing. But that's OK. I think if you're in the business, if you think your software company is going to make it, ⁓ building agents and having agents, I think you're wrong. I don't think that that's going to be the future. I think companies are going to build their own agents because why would I buy a vendor's agent that kind of does what I do want to do, but not quite? Why wouldn't I just build the agent? So, and we've been working with clients of ours for years where we have engines and they can build their own interface on top of our engines. the way, our play is all about the engines because again, remember what we've done. We've built engines. We have a data engine that's built for scale and performance and handling all kinds of data. And I can push data any place in enterprise and I can receive data from any place. And I don't care if you've got, if you're using telium to do events and whatever else, it can all just get consumed and it can all sit, it can all be available through the engine. And then we have an interaction.
Rio (36:04)
So it'd the company. be your, your agent, but then be the, which hop across to different. would like event data, helium. It will grab that. Then it'll take it. Okay.
Dale Renner (36:11)
We're not doing the agents. We're working with companies right now who they've identified a half a dozen to eight agents and those agents have a purpose and those agents sit at this layer. What they want is for us, and we have this, right? We have an MCP and that MCP then will get you into the engine that will then give you the data. So let's think about a simple campaign, how I think this will work.
I'm a company of many products. ⁓ have 3 % of my products churn off every couple of years because of whatever reason, doesn't matter. And I want to know, I've still got inventory. So I go out to my PIMS, right? My agent could go out to my PIMS because I could say, I want to run a campaign, a pre-sale. I'm going have this massive sale. I'm going to get rid of all this stuff. I'm going to have a pre-sale for my best customers. That's what I'm going to do. And so I'm going to, I'm going to use an, I'm going to have this agent and this agent will be able to go out to the PIM system and say, find all of the products that have this movement or lack of movement. Then I want to go out to my data engine through the MCP and give me an audience then of all the people who would have a propensity to buy this thing. Then I want to go out to my interaction engine through MCP and I want to be able to create.⁓ segments and orchestration out of that. And so, and then I'll push those out to the channels, right? So in effect, what's happened here is the way I think this is going to work is with those agents, I no longer have to worry about bringing all that data together. I can work across that because in a big organization, that will take forever, right? People will spend a decade trying to
Rio (37:58)
And it needs to be agents that are created and run that control plan by the company, right? Because that makes sense because they're not locked in a vendor and they can work across, through MCP, they can work across different solutions.
Dale Renner (38:02)
Like the company. think... Yes. I think...
Right. Yup. And that's where I think is going to happen. And then, and then those engines in our case, we have these engines and that's how our biggest comp, that's how our biggest customers are using us for those engines. And I'm, I'm flattered that they would build something on top of our engines because I don't, I don't know what they're Metadata warehouse. That's a, that's just a repository. The engine has everything to do with data curation, right? Data preparation. It's.
Brett House (38:30)
And would you define your engines as data warehouses and how do they interact with it?
Dale Renner (38:41)
How do I get that? How do I create that golden record? So if you think about the medallion model, for example, right, I've got bronze, which is basically, that's the thing that everybody, everybody thinks that they're doing something when they dump data into a data lake house or whatever you want to call it, right? That's just data. You still have to curate all that data. Then there's the gold layer, which is where now I'm doing all the identities in between that silver and that gold.
Brett House (38:59)
Yeah.
Dale Renner (39:09)
I'm doing the identities, the aggregations, any rules or whatever it is that I'm creating. And that data all sits there. That's what I'm getting at is that that curation and that transformation of that data, I'm not talking about data movement, data pipes. You're going to be able to, you can buy that from AWS.
Brett House (39:26)
But isn't that a lot of that already happening, especially with larger organizations, warehouse native, meaning you've got Snowflake, you've got Databricks, you've got native applications. We have this for identity resolution with Newstart that are built directly into that place where they manage all of their consumer data. ⁓ And everything happens within that. And then you've got apps that are plugging into the data source.
Rio (39:45)
Well, I guess it depends on where identity sits. You're saying like, so system record for data is the cloud data, whereas, but the actual identity sits in your engine.
Dale Renner (39:58)
Our engine creates the identity because if you're to right to your point, all that data comes in. How are you linking Dale Renner, right? At his his New Hampshire address. All those things, all those things, right? And then I think about business, right? So we work with American Express. They have tens of millions of businesses they work with. They have very complex programs. They have
Brett House (40:09)
Yeah, the 75 variations of you in the digital ecosystem.
Dale Renner (40:27)
all kinds of credit programs that they offer to their customers. And, you know, these are smart people, right? They think about, they want to understand those businesses and they want to, are they growing, right? And can I step them up in the programs that I do? Can I offer more services, right? Well, if Dale Renner's running one of those businesses, it would be nice to know that Dale Renner is also an American Express card holder. It'd be good to know that his wife has two American Express cards, right?
Rio (40:59)
Well, so, so Dale, it sounds
like you're saying there's identity plus there's like audience, like segmentation and audience development would also sit in this engine or maybe. Okay.
Dale Renner (41:05)
There's. Yep. Well, there's two engines, they're two engines because they're different purposes. Right. And, and, and you could use my engines or somebody else's engine. My point isn't that, ⁓ you have to use my engines. Right. I mean, I would like companies to use my engines, but my point is I think that the, business of building agents, I mean, we have companies tell us right now, I'm working with a bunch of them. Tell us we'll build the, we'll build the agents. And I've actually said to my customers, I am not in the agent building business. I think that is folly because that would imply that somehow I know how you want to run your business. And I don't, I don't, I do think that AI is going to replace the UI. You know, maybe, mean, it isn't like, and I don't believe that AI is just going to replace people. You still have to have a strategy. You still have to have people who look at it. Is it right? Does it make sense? And all that kind of stuff, right?
Brett House (41:58)
Yeah, orchestration and governance and...
Dale Renner (42:03)
But I just think that, I think everybody's going to be able to build agents. That's when they're talking about this, you know, and it's happening fast. Yep. It's happening really, really, really, really fast.
Brett House (42:10)
There's a commoditization around the, the, the agentic build model. Yeah, it's happening. And it were, where, yeah. So you built something three months ago or even three weeks ago and it could be disrupted tomorrow. Right. I was actually talking to Ben wild of Georgian, which is a big venture. They're a helium investor. Yeah. And, Ben was saying that, ⁓ that agentic that, that he, for any investment option that they have for any AI company, most mostly AI investments, it's like 90 % of what they invest in now.
Rio (42:24)
He's been in our pod before you.
Brett House (42:38)
He gives them a test and he's been with the company for 17 years, right? So he's, I don't know if he's one of the co-founders of Georgian Capital, but yeah, head of innovation. So he'll take two days, 24 to 48 hours. And if he can rebuild that solution in Claude code, he will not invest in the company. And so that's how quick the product production life cycles are. It's like companies are coming to him asking for millions of dollars of investment, but some of this stuff can be disrupted.
Rio (42:45)
So he's head of innovation.
Brett House (43:07)
in 48 hours because you can build an MVP of the same thing. Right. Do you see that as sort of a threat to, kind of the fundamental, you know, defensibility of some of your capabilities, some of CDPs capabilities in general that, some of this stuff could be MVP developed very quickly and
Dale Renner (43:26)
Yeah, I guess, you know, I guess you have to look at everything as a threat, right? In a way. I guess what I would say is this. ⁓ I think you can build. We use cloud code, right? Because we use it. I have a mandate in my company that everybody has to use AI. If it's the marketing people use AI for account based marketing. I don't care. You got to use AI. The coders we've been we've been coding with this stuff for a while. Get about 75 % efficiency.
Brett House (43:39)
Yeah. Yep.
Dale Renner (43:56)
But it's not perfect code. And when you get into complexity, it's a different problem. Because remember, easy things.
Brett House (43:58)
Yeah.
Dale Renner (44:09)
You can build easy things fast. Now that doesn't mean that you can't build hard things with it, but it's not fast. you know, if you do, let's just pretend for a minute you do, ⁓ you say, ⁓ I built an identity resolution product in over my lunch hour. Okay. What did you match up? What you do? Well, yeah, we matched on email address. Okay. Well, then you're no better than everybody that does that. right. You see what I'm saying?
Brett House (44:35)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Dale Renner (44:37)
So it depends on what it is. But I would have to say that ⁓ scale, performance, handling complexity, I think that that's something that not everybody needs, but the companies that need it, they need it and they will pay for it. And I want to collaborate and work with those people those companies. Not that I won't work with smaller companies. That's not my point. if you go to, I would say, I think I can say this, 100 % of my healthcare clients I would say probably the same on my, on the financial services guys. They're very leery of AI, very leery. You know, they're, they are hugely protective of their data and they're very concerned about that data getting consumed by some large language model.
Brett House (45:31)
Yeah.
Rio (45:40)
Well, these are slow moving organizations. have to be because of, because of regulation. Right. I mean, I don't think they have a choice, you know, that, you know, the, downside of making a mistake is so massive, right. In terms of the loss to trust, you know, the fines you're going to get lawsuits. So I really, I liked the point you made earlier about like who deploys and who owns the agents. actually heard this amazing theory the other day or question. was a discussion I was having like in the future, like, like Brett, you think about it, you're deploying agents now to run your business. Right.
Dale Renner (45:44)
Right.
Brett House (45:45)
Yeah.
Dale Renner (45:50)
Yes. Yeah.
Rio (46:10)
Um, like who owns these agents? So like even from employees perspective, right? Let's say you, you have agents to start doing things for you, right? Do you take them with you when you, when you start a new job or you go to a new client, do you bring your own agents or are going to say use ours? think I would imagine people are going to want to bring their own because like, even like I look at my version of the AIs I use, I've trained them on how I write, how I think they have all the material I've used. I mean, I'm getting such a higher quality output than I would have gotten a year ago when I started this before, before I had trained them. I would never want to lose that. Right. I mean, like, cause it. Yeah.
Brett House (46:46)
You build that memory core, It's a memory brain and then some coders will tell you there's a soul ⁓ part to all of this, right? It just...
Rio (46:56)
Well, I don't know if I agree with that, like, so Dale, your point about the company is like, from a brand perspective, I think you would want to own the agents, right? Why would you use a vendor? Why would you use a vendors?
Dale Renner (47:07)
I don't think you would because I think that you would want to own those. like I said, don't really know. Let me answer your first question. First of all, if you're an employee and you have an employment agreement with a company, I promise you that in that agreement, it says that company owns all IP you create.
Brett House (47:29)
Yeah, all intellectual property, includes wherever it's distributed or managed.
Rio (47:29)
Everything you create a hundred percent. Yep.
Dale Renner (47:32)
Right. It doesn't matter.
Rio (47:34)
Yeah. So no work. have to, have to, we have to use work mandated, like an approved version. So it's like within our firewall that containerized. So we have to use this. That's non-negotiable. Yeah. I think most companies like that, but like my outside of work stuff, right? I mean, like it would be nice to be able to bring your own agent sin, but it's not happening now, but yeah, keep going to cut you off.
Dale Renner (47:50)
Well, I was just gonna say, so I'm not sure that you would bring them in unless that you would license them, right? If somebody wanted to license them from you, then sure, why not, right? Because maybe you created an agent that does a really unique thing and it's high value and fast to implement, time to value and all that kind of stuff. And I own that, but if you developed it on a company's time and resource, then they own it. ⁓ So that's just kind of a thing. ⁓ And I, please, no, no, please.
Brett House (48:18)
So it sounds like you guys are definitely not adopting the high touch model, right? Which I think Rio in his article talked about the agentic control plane. You're more of the, what I think you called Rio, the intelligent marketing platform, which is a bit more like treasure data, which the CEP sort of evolves upward. ⁓ It absorbs capabilities that were historically sort of, yeah, capabilities that were ⁓ scattered.
Rio (48:37)
It's a more IT-centric model, yeah.
Brett House (48:43)
⁓ But it's not quite as monolithic as sort of the Adobe experience cloud or the sales forces or the oracles. But you centralize a lot of those core functions in one place. So it's still platform centric. Right. Is that is that the model that you guys are taking you think in terms of being
Dale Renner (48:59)
Yeah, think so because we'll platform centric. Let me think about that. So I would never sit here and say you should buy ⁓ Redpoint to do all the things and we'll do everything that Adobe does. That's just stupid. Right. ⁓ And same with Salesforce. And keep in mind, too, that each of those companies have only ever developed one product. They bought everything else. So so ⁓ so what I would what I would say is if you have those things.
Brett House (49:11)
Yeah. Yeah.
Dale Renner (49:27)
those, some of those products and you need, but you need what I have. I can work with that, right? I can, I can run in any data environment. I can run in any cloud. I can, I have, you know, we work with, you know, we work with customers who use AWS, Google and Azure. we have Snowflake. have, we have, ⁓ Databricks. We've got SQL Server. You know, we work in those environments.
Brett House (49:34)
Yeah.
Dale Renner (49:55)
Because one of the things about us, and you kind of go back to the moat thing, I run on, I can still run on premise. Right. And, and that's a big advantage for me in healthcare and in regulated industries. Right. I can also offer that as a SaaS, but then, then it's kind of like, are you guys sure you want to do that? Because now you're replicating data. Why are you doing that? And I can operate it as a data in place where I run the application. Cause most companies when it comes right down to it, there's not a lot of value.
Brett House (50:03)
Yeah. Yeah.
Dale Renner (50:24)
for them to run an application, right? So if I could just, if I run the application and you know, all of our software is containerized and you know, we went all in on Kubernetes and even our on-premise, big on-premise customers, they're using Kubernetes and containers and all that kind of stuff. So that all works really well. But I can run that application for them and the data can stay with them. You got to process the data. Everyone that says they got zero copy data, I don't even understand how that can possibly be. But you would encrypt the data, send it to me, decrypt, process, encrypt, send it back, do your thing with it. I don't store your data. That's different than a SaaS that stores your data. The challenge that I see, and we're not this, right? If you look at the so-called platforms and if it's, ⁓ let's say Salesforce, well, then you're buying into what Salesforce is doing.
Brett House (51:08)
Yeah. Yeah.
Dale Renner (51:22)
And you, and then I don't understand how, I guess I don't understand exactly how AI works then, because the point of AI is to have access across the enterprise to the data. Just the example that I gave you, I want to go to the PIMS, I want to go to the audience. want to go create, right? If that's, if that's an agent that's doing that, well, okay. So is all my data in Salesforce or just some of my data in Salesforce? And then what does that traffic look like?
Brett House (51:35)
Yeah, no matter where it lives, yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Dale Renner (51:50)
And then what's what is out there and what kind of vendor lock in because this whole AI thing, by the way, there's a there is a big surprise coming for everybody about how expensive this is going to be. Big surprise. Everybody's doing this. Everybody's doing this. look at this. know, yeah, Claude cost me $200, whatever it is. Right, right. So so.
Brett House (52:01)
Yeah, the tokenization. mean, yeah. $20,000 I just spent on tokens this month.
Rio (52:03)
Yeah, they're getting the bills now. Many of them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For something that's not even a production for a bunch of like, you know, experimentation, you get a million dollar bill. Yeah, that happens.
Dale Renner (52:16)
Right. So what happens then and what happens when I'm locked in and the prices start to go up on me. Right. So you're you huge, huge challenge, right? Huge challenge. And that's why I don't know if I. I don't know if I want to be a platform the way that all those negative things are, because because I would rather be I'd rather be part of the platform, the engines, because the platform does the platform provides the infrastructure.
Brett House (52:23)
Yeah, so platform lock-in is a huge challenge here. Yeah.
Dale Renner (52:46)
for those engines to work. You can plug my engines in, you can build your own agents, you can use the UI. And remember, not everybody's gonna use the, there'll be people who are using the web UI, there'll be people using client server applications still, there'll be people who are using the agents. So my goal is to be able to support any and all those interfaces, if you will, but not to build all those interfaces. I don't know how anybody does that.
Brett House (53:10)
Yeah. So it almost, sounds like a composable model.
Dale Renner (53:15)
It is. It is. I composability, you know, I always kind of I scoffed at that a bit at first just because, you know, it's my nature. the but the but if you kind of think about composability, I thought, OK, well, that's just another term for people who cannot work, you know, who can't do certain things. Well, I'm composable. It's just like, you know, reverse ETL. Got to think about that. Yeah. Well, you know, and so reverse ETL. How does that work?
Brett House (53:35)
Yeah, it's like a counter positioning. I can't do this, but I can do that. Yeah.
Dale Renner (53:42)
Do you actually reverse the ETL, the transformations? No, no, all it is is you don't have that capability. So the reverse ETL part of that is you expect someone else to provide that. And then you can create a segment out of that. But if someone else isn't giving great golden records with pristine data, your software ain't going to do crap. So, no, I embrace composability and I think that I actually think that smart people that I like to work with at my customers, they are not afraid of that. And they're not afraid to say, no, it doesn't make sense for me to go all in on Salesforce or Adobe. Adobe's got this great content thing. I'm buying that. I'm going to use that. But I still think back on the quadrants, I think that the people who use the quadrants, organizations where procurement is driving the buying process and they want the top four or five, whatever it is. ⁓ But the procurement people aren't responsible for the results, are they?
Brett House (54:40)
totally.
Rio (54:43)
Procurement always asks for the quadrant. They always do.
Brett House (54:45)
Yeah, and Ria, we talked about with Matthew. Yeah. Well, and those, they also don't understand the tech or the ecosystem in general. And it's, and if you're out there talking in the ecosystem, talking to the technical people, you will have an inherent understanding. And it's up to the CMOs and others that are using these tools to have that level of knowledge versus just allowing procurement to run a vendor selection process. Cause they're not going to be able to do it effectively. Yeah.
Rio (55:06)
Yeah. Well, I think it depends on the organization, right? mean, there will be some where the procurement advises, right? And it will be, I've had vendors for procurement actually like makes the decisions. I think that's insane, right? I think it actually creates more problems. And in media business, you know, which I've been a lot of my career in, right? I mean, I think the big complaint is now it's just the race to the bottom. If you just value any based on CPMs or major pubs, I mean, it's like, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's.
Brett House (55:18)
Yeah. Yeah, or just based on price in general, right? They've got KPIs that are drive down price, but they're not going to fully understand the nuances of what you're losing from a capability perspective, et cetera.
Dale Renner (55:42)
Well, and look, you can make an evaluation if you've got a whole bunch of criteria, which people do. They've got all this selection stuff, and they wait, and they do that. And they was, know, okay, this is two times three because it's important. All this kind of stuff. You can manipulate any model, any model, right? You can manipulate. Yeah, exactly. To get the answer you want. I reverse engineered the Gartner model on the score and I reverse engineered the Forrester model on the score.
Rio (55:58)
You can the result you want, yeah.
Dale Renner (56:07)
I understand where the models are. understand what they put the weight on and it's really, really simple. But then the real question is, why did you rate me a four out of five here, but a two out of five here? Interesting. look at this. Look what that two does versus the four. It drops you down. Right? ⁓ So that's the problem with
Rio (56:27)
Right, if you made that a three or four, yeah, mean, and you could, it's totally subjective, right? Yeah.
Brett House (56:34)
Yeah.
Dale Renner (56:35)
with all those things. And that's the problem that I think that's the challenge that procurement has with being in that.
Rio (56:42)
Well, how do you help brands then? mean, like if there's so much confusion, procurement's driving a lot of this, they don't know what they're doing. And to your point earlier, lot of likes, you know, some clients are very well informed, but you know, some are less so. And like in a lot of marketers now are maybe less technical. How do you like help inform the buyers about like how to make these decisions on what they should do? Like what's your approach?
Dale Renner (57:02)
Yeah, so first of all, I would not say that they don't know what they're doing. I just want to be clear, right? ⁓ Right. There are people who know what they're doing. But I'll tell you what, the people that I see having the most success, whether they're a smaller company or a larger company, are the people who are from Missouri. Show me. Right? They have the Missouri mindset. I don't mean literally from Missouri, but it's that show me.
Brett House (57:06)
Well you wouldn't want to say that to them whether or you believe that or not.
Dale Renner (57:30)
And what I always tell everybody is give us a set of use cases.
Rio (57:36)
Probably like fried ravioli too then, right?
Dale Renner (57:38)
Yeah, but give us the easy ones. Give us the...
Brett House (57:39)
⁓ Yeah, I don't think I've ever heard that the Missouri mindset, but I was born in St. Louis, Missouri. ⁓ Missouri.
Dale Renner (57:46)
It's a show me stay. It's look at their license. It's their license. It's a show me. Right. So so if you but but but you know, do the easy stuff, do the medium stuff and put some things in there that you think you might want to do and you or things that you think will be hard to do and then have the vendors show you how they would do that. And when they do that, chances are I'm going to win.
Rio (57:48)
Good barbecue, very good barbecue in St. Louis. Yeah.
Brett House (57:50)
Very good barbecue. Yeah. So it sounds like a lot of your success hinges on it's correct. You guys are doing data collection, right? Data preparation ⁓ for compliance and use case readiness, right? A lot of that stuff, segmentation, that's very hard to do to your point, especially in heavily regulated industries, right?
Dale Renner (58:17)
because
Rio (58:30)
segmentation, right? And what about the third one is decisioning. like, guess, is that the third one, like the decisioning engine? Does that something one of your engines too, or is that something to be outside?
Dale Renner (58:42)
Yeah, we used to do that, but I concluded a couple of years ago that it's folly for us to try to do that because I think there are people who do that better. now we do. Let me make it. Let me me caveat that a bit. We do. ⁓ We do real time decision. There's if you think about orchestration, right, there's outbound orchestration, which is which is asynchronous. I send an email and I wait. Then there's synchronous. And when somebody comes inbound.
Brett House (59:06)
Yep.
Dale Renner (59:11)
call center, website, whatever that synchronous activity is. There, we have a decisioning engine that we use to drive next best actions. But the decisioning that I'm talking about, this analytics capability where you're a Tableau or you have that kind of capability, Well, why would I ever replicate that? And Tableau will be like everybody else. They're probably using machine learning.
Brett House (59:14)
Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yeah.
Dale Renner (59:41)
What we did because we went down some of these paths is we figured out how all this stuff works. And then what we did is we figured out how to ring fence what we're doing and ring fence what those other things do. And then we said, what's inside their ring fence? We're not going to do, and we're not going to position it as that because the worst thing in my opinion you can do in a sales situation is make a claim about how you do something. And someone is sitting there and going,
Brett House (59:54)
Yeah. You can't back up. Yeah.
Dale Renner (1:00:09)
I've been using Tableau for 15 years. I'll tell you whether you can do that or not. Right. So it's just, so why, why would you go down that path? It's stupid. So, right.
Brett House (1:00:18)
Yeah. And to me that's, that's a bit more like passive dashboarding versus next best action, which is a bit more predictive.
Dale Renner (1:00:23)
Well, it is unless you get bidirectional capability in there and that information is then being fed back into the engines. So now the data is sitting there and it's available and now someone comes in in a synchronous way and you're trying to drive decisioning, you might want those insights out of the analytics. Those people are doing something.
Brett House (1:00:33)
Okay, there's almost this exhaust to help the yeah Yeah, it might change your segmentation schema, your audience target, your channel execution. Yeah, it's data.
Dale Renner (1:00:48)
Yep. Yep. It's data, right? know, analytics are nothing more than data that's been thought through, right? That's what it is. So, yep.
Brett House (1:00:59)
Yeah. And so you guys are focused more on that next best action versus sort of a full sort of analytics tool that would, you know, dashboard and do all the sort of, right.
Dale Renner (1:01:08)
Yeah, yeah. Cause there just are better products out there, right? And we can, we can work with, mean, Sigma has a great product, right? Easy to use.
Brett House (1:01:16)
Yeah. Does that lead down the path of orchestration? It's sort of, you know, best plus future actions, whether it's targets or channels. Yeah.
Dale Renner (1:01:27)
Could be, could be, yep, yep. Because one of the things, pardon, pardon.
Rio (1:01:31)
Yeah. Yeah. I next best action deal. It's one of those, I think it's another term that like it, it can mean different things, right? It could mean something really basic, like contact center. You're just giving like recommendations, like you're telling like three things you could possibly say, or here's the group, or here's a high risk customer that might churn, right? I that could be considered an expects action, or it could be like a, like a multi-channel orchestration where it's deciding what channels to engage in. It's deciding what messages, even what content I mean, which, which is much harder to do. So go ahead. I cut you off.
Brett House (1:01:47)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Dale Renner (1:01:59)
No, no, I was going to make that point. It depends on what you mean by that. ⁓ Come back to the point. I disagree with that analytics. Let me think about this a second. I disagree that analytics, the way I'm thinking about analytics should be part of a CDP. I don't get it. ⁓ I don't, however, disagree that, and no one is talking, they don't talk about it like this.
Brett House (1:02:03)
Yeah.
Dale Renner (1:02:27)
that the results of that work that those people do, because there are a lot of smart people that are working with that stuff, right? I want those results fed back into my engine so that I can put that in the golden record so that when somebody comes in or I'm going to push a campaign out, I want all the data. I want to know everything that's knowable about a person or business. That's what I want. Now, whether you achieve that or not is to be determined. But if you have that mindset, then you have to look at what does it cost to get that and is it worth it? What's the trade off, right? It's just like AI. If I can improve, I don't know, if I can improve my segments by 1%, right, is using a large language, the cost of a large language model to drive that through AI, is there a payoff there? If however I improve my
Brett House (1:03:24)
Mm.
Dale Renner (1:03:26)
data security by 1 % by using AI, that might be worth a lot because it might be the difference between staying in business and going under. So, so I kind of think it's like that too. It's like people need to understand the cost benefit of all these things because we are really early in this. And I just think it's going to cost a lot. So, you know, any other analytics that can be done to help get a better result will help drive a higher value theoretically, right? ⁓ To maybe offset some of those costs. mean, it's a model, right? And you gotta kinda, it's a business model. So you gotta kinda figure all that out. But yeah, that's my view of why I think that's an important thing, but why we're not gonna do it. Why we're not.
Brett House (1:04:05)
Yep. So do you think at the end to conclude all of this, you think CDP remains a standalone category? Should it?
Dale Renner (1:04:23)
I don't know. I don't really
Rio (1:04:24)
Shut it.
Dale Renner (1:04:25)
care if it does. We'll just find another category to belong to or something, Yeah, know, the RFPs that we get today are still for CDP. The vast majority of RFPs are for CDP. When we go talk to customers or prospects, everyone who wants to talk about AI ready data, everybody wants to talk about
Brett House (1:04:31)
Yeah, it's sort of an inside out view of the world versus an outside in client use case view. Yep. Yeah.
Dale Renner (1:04:51)
Tell me about data readiness. How do I have to think about that? What does that mean? What is that going to cost me? And then you get into a discussion, right? What are you trying to do? Right? And so I think that the idea of data, to me, what was old is new again. I think that we kind of lost, for us data guys, we kind of got lost for a few years because it was the easy buttons and the gee whizzes. You know, all these things and this cool stuff and these great interfaces and you should your interface should be that. Well, we don't do that. So so now it's data right now. Everyone's going to sit here and say, if I'm doing all this spending. To put AI and to do these things, I better be getting a better result, and the result does not come from doing a faster building, a faster audience. It comes from having better data to drive. a better audience to drive a better up.
Brett House (1:05:50)
Yeah.
Rio (1:05:51)
Yeah, Dale, that's a really good point. Actually, I think that like maybe the category evolves instead of like data prep and readiness and normalization for activation, it becomes data prep and readiness and organization and like normalization for AI use cases, which could be activation. could be lots of things, right? But I think as we go to something, that's kind of where I like, that's a great point. I've heard that from a bunch of other vendors too. That's where they see things going.
Brett House (1:05:52)
Yeah.
Dale Renner (1:06:16)
Yeah, so there's, we're all brilliant.
Rio (1:06:19)
So where are, so,
so, so, so, so, I was great discussion. I see we're, we're, we're right, probably around time, but I'm not brilliant. It's like, how, if someone wants to get ahold of you Dale, let's chat more to get, learn about Redpoint to ⁓ find about some of your things you're working on and like, okay.
Dale Renner (1:06:33)
Redpointglobal.com, go to redpointglobal.com, right? And I don't know if my cell phone is on our website or not, ⁓ based on the calls I get, it must be someplace that I've been. my God, I'm actually contemplating getting a different phone number. yeah, but no, and I appreciate the question, but we...
Brett House (1:06:46)
I hope you're not answering all those calls that just come randomly into your mobile phone. Yeah.
Dale Renner (1:06:59)
We'd love to talk to you. The thing that I learned a long time ago, it's a lot easier just to be honest, tell people what you can do. You got to find out what they're going to do. And then does this make sense or not? And every time in my career that I tried to sell something that did not make sense or that we were going to have to do something to turn ourselves inside out to do it, I've regretted the day. So I have just found that, you know, having the conversation and.
Brett House (1:07:27)
Go to market with the truth that's tied to a client need. But there is the innovator's dilemma, right? That if you're too, yeah, if you're too tied to the client need, the client can drive you out of business. Because they don't see what's, they're not gonna see that innovation that's gonna change things in six months or a year from now. They just want you to solve their current use case. So I always find that's the biggest challenge in in sort of tech sass is how do you...
Dale Renner (1:07:30)
Yeah. There is. That's right. That's right. Yeah. Right. Yeah.
Brett House (1:07:54)
make the client happy, but not allow the client to sort of prevent your innovation life cycles, right? And to help, cause you're going to pitch stuff that may not be built yet because you see what's going to happen in the six months that your client ⁓ doesn't see, right? And before you know it, you're looking, you know, in the rear view mirror at some serious competitors that are going to disrupt you. That's the innovators dilemma, right?
Dale Renner (1:08:15)
Well, that's right. And you're always at that risk, I guess. And so it's just life. ⁓ But we work with our clients because they have needs. And we work their needs in. But the one thing that we do that helps us a lot is we don't have multiple versions of our code. ⁓ If you want me to put it in the software, then it becomes available for everybody. If you don't want that, then you can just use the SDK. You can build it yourself.
You can hire us to build it for you or something. You know, my services people, or you can hire, you can hire one of our partners to build it for you, but I won't maintain it. And I won't guarantee that it'll work because right.
Brett House (1:08:53)
Yeah. Yeah, you open source it for those clients that have some sort of custom ⁓ code request or capability request. Well, this has been great, Dale. Thanks. It's been a great, it's great to hear your story, you know, from the very beginnings of this space. ⁓ All we have it on record on, on, on a signal and noise. So thanks for joining us. Everybody that's listened all the way through. Thanks for, listening all the way through.
Dale Renner (1:09:02)
if that's what they want.
Rio (1:09:04)
New feature, yeah. The first CDP sale we have on a record here.
Dale Renner (1:09:15)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Brett House (1:09:25)
You can listen to us on watch us on YouTube, listen to us on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, subscribe and we will ⁓ see you next time. Thanks everybody.
Dale Renner (1:09:34)
Yep. All right. Thanks guys.
Rio (1:09:35)
Thank you.
Comments