Going Global, Staying Sovereign

For years, “in the vendor’s cloud” was an acceptable answer. Composable CDPs improved it to “it never leaves our warehouse”. That tells you where the data sits. It doesn’t tell you who runs the infrastructure underneath it, whose laws that provider has to obey, or what it would take to walk away.

If you work in a bank, insurer or telco, these are the questions you’re now being asked. Regulators expect you to name where customer data is stored and processed, keep audit rights over every critical supplier, and show an exit plan that would actually work. “It’s in our warehouse” is starting to sound like an answer about residency, not sovereignty.

Matthew Niederberger of Martech Therapy recently wrote about the first sovereign CDPs in “Open CDP & Local AI CDP” Oh my…. His verdict is no sales pitch. Sovereignty moves cost and responsibility rather than removing them. Someone still has to run the platform, and the evidence a regulator accepts comes from people who can explain how it works, not from an architecture diagram.

In this session, Matthew puts those points to Projjol Banerjea, Zeotap’s founder and CPO, and Sathish KS, Zeotap’s CTO. Their teams built Zeotap’s Open CDP, which runs on open-source compute over the customer’s own lakehouse.