Tealium CEO: AI, IoT and the ongoing customer data integration challenge

Ask any marketer what's on their to-do list in 2017, and they'll tell you they have a project underway to achieve a 360-degree view of the customer, Tealium's global CEO, Jeff Lunsford, says. "Any marketer is going to be looking to pull in data about that customer or a prospect from the myriad points where data is available in this new world," he says. "This could be IoT, mobile devices, or customer care. "Every marketer will nod yes, they want to leverage all the data they possibly can. So there's vision sync across the industry, the question is, how to do that." Tealium is one of a growing number of vendors looking to provide that answer with its Universal Data Hub, a software solution aimed at addressing data fragmentation for marketers across online and offline channels. The platform brings together the vendor's AudienceStream and DataAccess solutions with its iQ foundational technology. Since launching six years ago, Tealium has spent several years integrating its offering with more than 1000 applications across the marketing ecosystem, and recently raised another US$35m in capital, off the back of increased investment earlier in 2016, bringing total funding to $112.9m. Tealium now has 750 enterprise customers globally, from small digital-first companies to the largest, mature organisations. Australian clients include Cronulla Sharks, Nude by Nature, Greenstone Financial, and Melbourne University, while Asia-Pacific clients include Cathy Pacific. Speaking to CMO during a visit to Australia this week, Lunsford described Tealium as the "neutral layer down the stack of the marketing cloud", and the common management component organisations need in order to be able to exchange data across multiple best-of-breed systems in real time. Rather than competing with the large marketing cloud providers, he sees Tealium's role as being a complementary component. Not surprisingly, Lunsford sees technology as providing the foundational layer marketers need across customer touchpoints to pull that 360-degree vision off. "Companies use multiple software applications to create the customer experience, each has its own idea of the customer, and most don't talk to each other," he says. "The average Tealium customer has 26 software applications that contribute to the customer experience.