B2B Customer Data Platforms

Forrester's 2023 evaluation of this market described itself as an assessment of standalone B2B customer data platform providers. The 2025 evaluation dropped that word, and two of the vendors it named Leaders were Adobe and Oracle.

One adjective, quietly deleted. It marks the point at which the independent B2B CDP stopped being the category and became one option inside it.

The problem the category exists to solve

A CDP unifies customer data from every system a company runs into a single profile, then makes that profile available to the tools that act on it. In consumer marketing that means resolving many signals to one person.

B2B has to resolve to three things at once, and this is the part that makes the category genuinely difficult rather than merely tedious.

There is the contact, a named individual with an email address and a job title. There is the account, the company that individual works for, which may itself be a subsidiary of something larger with its own contract. And there is the buying group, the six or nine or thirteen people at that account who are collectively evaluating a purchase, most of whom have never filled in a form.

A B2C CDP that gets identity resolution right has solved its hardest problem. A B2B CDP that gets identity resolution right at the contact level has solved the easiest of its three, and the two harder ones are where deals are actually won. Adobe's Leader citation in the current Wave points at exactly this, crediting unified profiles across contacts, accounts, and buying groups.

Anyone who has watched a marketing qualified lead get routed to a rep who already has an open opportunity at that account, from a different contact, has seen what happens when the account layer fails.

Squeezed from above and below

The standalone CDP is under pressure from two directions simultaneously, which is why the word disappeared from the report title.

From above, the marketing suites absorbed the function. If you already run Adobe or Oracle across marketing and CX, the CDP becomes a module rather than a purchase, and the integration argument that justified a specialist starts working against it.

From below, the data warehouse ate the storage layer. Composable and warehouse-native architectures leave the customer data where it already lives, in Snowflake or BigQuery or Databricks, and push activation on top of it rather than copying everything into a proprietary store first. Hightouch, evaluated in this category for the first time in 2025, came out of that lineage.

These are opposite answers to the same objection. The suite says stop buying separate tools. The warehouse-native vendor says stop moving your data twice. Both are aimed at the middle, and the middle is where standalone CDPs sat.

What survives in that middle is specificity. A platform that understands B2B account hierarchies, buying group modelling, and third-party enrichment out of the box is doing something neither a generic suite module nor a warehouse activation layer does by default.

Inside The Forrester Wave: Customer Data Platforms For B2B, Q3 2025

Published in Q3 2025, the evaluation scored eleven providers against twenty six criteria grouped into current offering and strategy. The predecessor, The Forrester Wave: B2B Customer Data Platforms, Q4 2023, used twenty nine criteria against the standalone field.

Oracle placed as a Leader with Unity, credited for putting B2B marketing and sales at the centre of its vision with out-of-the-box go-to-market capability, and for an extensive set of native AI models supporting work like scoring. Adobe also placed as a Leader, taking the highest possible scores in vision, innovation, roadmap, partner ecosystem, and adoption, on a single system of truth argument with governance attached.

Among the Strong Performers, Hightouch was noted for journey orchestration with simulation capability, which the report treated as unusual, and for an open data schema its customers appreciated. Treasure Data was positioned for enterprises wanting flexibility and AI-enabled real-time engagement. Scal-e, a European provider, was recognised for understanding B2B third-party enrichment needs and for building privacy compliance into the product rather than bolting it on, with a no-code interface over B2B and industry-specific data models.

That last profile is worth dwelling on if you operate under EU rules. Compliance-first architecture is a different proposition from a compliance module, and it is one of the few places where a smaller vendor has a structural rather than a price advantage.

The category next door

One recurring confusion is worth heading off, because the two categories get conflated in vendor decks constantly.

A B2B CDP unifies data you already have. A marketing and sales data provider sells you data you do not have. Forrester evaluates those separately, most recently in The Forrester Wave: Marketing and Sales Data Providers for B2B, Q1 2026, where ZoomInfo took the highest current offering score.

You will likely need both, and they are not substitutes. Enrichment without unification gives you better records scattered across the same disconnected systems. Unification without enrichment gives you a clean single view of an incomplete picture.

Where these deployments actually fail

Not usually on features. On two things that never appear on a comparison matrix.

The first is identity resolution rules, which nobody wants to own. Deciding when two contacts are the same person, when two domains are the same account, and how a subsidiary relates to its parent are business decisions dressed as technical configuration. Vendors will implement whatever you specify. They will not specify it for you, and a CDP configured on someone's assumptions in month two produces confidently wrong account rollups in year two.

The second is the activation end. A unified profile that nobody acts on is an expensive data warehouse with better branding. Before signing, trace the path from a resolved buying group to something a salesperson sees in the CRM at the moment they need it. If that path runs through a nightly batch job and a report nobody opens, the platform will not change your pipeline regardless of where it placed.

Forrester does not endorse any vendor named here, and tier placement should not be read as a recommendation to buy.