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The Gist
- Why are Salesforce, Hightouch and Databricks all talking about orchestration? Because the orchestration layer increasingly represents the strategic control point for customer decisions, campaign selection and AI-driven engagement.
- What happened to the warehouse-centric martech vision? Many organizations discovered critical customer context lives outside the warehouse, forcing platforms to incorporate additional data sources and standalone customer data capabilities.
- What should buyers watch for in Agentic CDP announcements? They should look beyond branding to understand whether systems truly perform cross-campaign arbitration, orchestration and real-time decisioning.
This week has seen three major CDP-related announcements (and it’s only Tuesday as I write this):
- Salesforce acquires Fin, which delivers AI-based customer service, shortly after having acquired Contentful content management system
- Hightouch repositions as an Agentic CDP, which can autonomously access warehouse data to identify and execute marketing opportunities
- Databricks launches CustomerLake, also called an Agentic CDP, and also combining warehouse (okay, lakehouse) data management with campaign development
Three announcements. Three very different companies. One common thread: a battle for control of orchestration layer.
Table of Contents
- The Difference Between Campaign Management and True Orchestration
- How Orchestration Overtook the Data Warehouse
- Can Orchestration Become Martech’s New Foundation?
The Difference Between Campaign Management and True Orchestration
Let me be very specific about what I mean by "orchestration." In plain terms, it’s the selection of the best action to take for each customer at any moment, considering all the actions that could be taken.
Since today’s marketers typically think in terms of campaigns — that is, a sequence of contacts with a fixed purpose and predefined content (although the content may be hyperpersonalized) — orchestration usually boils down to picking which campaign a customer should enter. What separates orchestration from campaign management is the orchestration system picks from the best of all the available campaigns, something called "arbitration."
None of this week’s announcements actually uses the term "arbitration," but it’s still the key difference between true orchestration and a bunch of disconnected campaigns. In fact, it’s not clear that Databricks or Hightouch are actually doing arbitration, in the sense of choosing among multiple campaigns. But it’s something that the logic of their products clearly requires, so we can expect them to add it if it’s not present already.
Salesforce, of course, has a vastly broader rang of products than the other two vendors, and I’m pretty sure that arbitration is buried in there somewhere. So while the Databricks and Hightouch announcements are about dipping their toes into the orchestration pool, Salesforce’s latest acquisitions are about building a bigger moat around their orchestration system. The Contentful acquisition in particular highlights the importance of access to content as part of the orchestration workflow. This is something that has often been ignored (and won’t go away when all content is custom-generated by AI).
Related Article: Is the CPD Still Queen? Exploring the Future of Customer Data
How Orchestration Overtook the Data Warehouse
Why has orchestration suddenly emerged as the key strategic chokepoint in the martech stack? After all, most industry discussion in the past few years has centered on the data warehouse as the primary platform for martech, with "composable" applications working on top of it.
I’d argue that the warehouse-centric enthusiasts won their battle but lost the war. When people started to look seriously at using their data warehouse to power a Customer Data Platform, they quickly discovered that large swaths of relevant data were not stored there. Common examples include real-time interactions, unstructured data, operational data (e.g. up-to-the-second inventory levels) and external data (e.g. local weather and market conditions).
In practice, the "warehouse-centric" systems had to provide access to non-warehouse data to build a complete view of customer "context." (Take a sip if you’re playing the "context" drinking game.)
Spurred by the high cost of in-warehouse data processing and missing features such as warehouse-native identity resolution, many firms found the optimal approach was to give their marketing systems access to a combination of warehouse and non-warehouse data, or even to assemble customer profiles in a stand-alone CDP that was optimized for the purpose.
This was very bad news for the warehouse vendors, who found that they were one source among many, rather than the foundational platform supporting dependent applications. Platform Economics 101 teaches that the foundational platform is an immensely powerful, quasi-monopoly position, which companies that compete with others to feed the platform and to draw from the platform are easily commoditized. So the switch from foundational platform to supporting source system was painful indeed.
Where the Agentic CDP Battle Is Really Being Fought
While Salesforce, Hightouch and Databricks approach customer data from different directions, their recent moves reveal a common goal: owning the orchestration layer that sits between customer intelligence and customer engagement. The result could reshape where power resides in the modern martech stack.
| Key Theme | What's Happening | Why It Matters |
|---|---|---|
| Orchestration Becomes the Strategic Prize | Vendors are increasingly competing to control the layer that determines the next-best action for each customer. | The orchestration layer sits between data and execution, making it a powerful control point across the customer lifecycle. |
| Arbitration Is the Critical Capability | True orchestration requires choosing among multiple campaigns, offers and interactions—not simply managing individual customer journeys. | The ability to prioritize competing actions is what separates orchestration from traditional campaign management. |
| Salesforce Expands Its Orchestration Moat | Recent acquisitions of Fin and Contentful strengthen Salesforce's access to customer service, content and engagement workflows. | Owning content, service and delivery capabilities creates a more complete orchestration ecosystem. |
| Hightouch and Databricks Move Up the Stack | Both vendors are extending beyond data infrastructure into decisioning, automation and customer engagement. | The CDP market is evolving from data management toward autonomous customer action. |
| The Warehouse-Centric Model Loses Ground | Organizations discovered that critical customer context often lives outside the data warehouse. | Real-time interactions, operational systems and external signals require broader data architectures. |
| Customer Context Drives Decisions | Effective orchestration depends on combining warehouse and non-warehouse data sources into a complete customer view. | Richer context improves personalization, prioritization and customer relevance. |
| Platform Economics Favor Control Layers | Foundational platforms historically capture more value than systems that simply supply or consume data. | Vendors are seeking to avoid commoditization by becoming the primary system of engagement and decision-making. |
| Orchestration Emerges as a New Chokepoint | All customer data feeds into orchestration, while analytics and delivery systems depend on its decisions. | This positioning gives orchestration the potential to become the next foundational martech platform. |
| Governance May Follow Orchestration | Capabilities such as privacy, compliance and governance could increasingly migrate into orchestration layers. | Broader responsibilities would strengthen orchestration's role as a strategic platform. |
| Agentic CDP Remains an Evolving Category | Vendors are using the same label to describe different architectures and capabilities. | Buyers should evaluate actual functionality rather than assume common definitions. |
| Marketing Hype Requires Verification | Many orchestration and agentic capabilities are newly launched and still maturing. | Organizations should validate what products can do today rather than rely solely on roadmaps and slide decks. |
Can Orchestration Become Martech’s New Foundation?
Orchestration, which sits directly above data in the martech architecture, is more promising. By definition, all data needs to feed into the orchestration system so it can act on a complete view of each customer, and all analytics and delivery systems need to read that data for ensure consistency and coordination. So it provides a natural chokepoint that can be the basis for a new foundational platform.
Will orchestration become the new core of the martech stack? It seems quite lightweight compared with the heavy technology of data, analytics and delivery systems. This could mean that anyone can build an orchestration system so there’s little chance for any vendor to lock in its clients. On the other hand, other functions could migrate to a bulked-up orchestration layer, such as governance, compliance and privacy, which do naturally seem to belong there. Or, following the Salesforce example, orchestration could become part of a tightly integrated orchestration, analytics and delivery system.
One final thought – while “Agentic CDP” seems to be the buzzword of the week, there’s no guarantee it will stick. Buyers should be very careful to look beneath the hood of any system they consider, since the term will inevitably mean different things to different vendors.
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Special caution is needed because these are new features, meaning vendors will inevitably imply they have greater capabilities than they can currently deliver. As always, it’s up to marketers and technologists to dig beyond the slide decks to understand exactly what each system does and doesn’t do.
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