ActionIQ adds capability to query data from external sources like data lakes

ActionIQ, the CDP and CX solutions provider, has announced HybridCompute, a new feature of its InfiniteCompute technology. InfiniteCompute enables the processing of data at, in principle, unlimited scale. HybridCompute will allow the querying of data across multiple systems, including enterprise data lakes, rather than just data uploaded to InfiniteCompute.

This is intended to provide an easier way to drive insights from data sources outside ActionIQ and creates the possibility of sourcing valuable customer data from existing IT data infrastructure investments. The initiative is supported by partnerships with major data lake providers like Data Bricks, Snowflake and Teradata.

Generating value from data investments. “We want to meet our customers wherever they are on their data infrastructure journey and help them generate greater value on those investments by providing them scalable storage and compute infrastructure when they need it, or the ability to query the data where it is with HybridCompute if they’ve already done the work of data unification,” explained Justin DeBrabant, ActionIQ’s SVP of product in a release.

Dig deeper: ActionIQ integrates with clean room platform to activate second-party data

Why we care. This is not the first sign of a very important shift in the structure of the CDP space. The traditional approach of CDPs has been what might be called “the single source of truth” approach. To the extent users were able to upload all their customer data from a wide variety of systems, the CDP could normalize and manage that data and drive insights from it.

This approach, however, was swimming against the trend — certainly at the enterprise level — to manage all business data, including customer data, in a single, large infrastructure. Replicating that data in a separate system — the CDP — can look duplicative and wasteful, to the IT team at least. ActionIQ is looking to solve for that, and it’s not the first enterprise CDP to do so. Expect similar developments going forward.