Privacy Tech | Platform vs Point Solution

Hello and welcome to the first edition of 518, a weekly privacy technology newsletter presented by?FLLR Consulting.

In this newsletter we look to unpack and make sense of the rapidly evolving privacy tech landscape.

For our inaugural newsletter, I explore the pros and cons of working with specialized point solutions versus wholistic platforms and where we see the market moving.

Let's jump into things.

7 years ago, if we were having this conversation, it'd be much simpler. Every tool in the privacy market was a point solution. Meaning they solved for one specific need, did it good enough, and never really broke from their mold. Early tools were research spreadsheets like Nymity and privacy certifications like TrustArc. Very specific and one-dimensional.

Then a little regulation called GDPR was approved. The GDPR (re)introduced compliance requirements on organizations driving consumer-facing changes along with back-office requirements of privacy programs. The risk of fines, the global impact, and an ever increasing complex working world, created the perfect recipe for venture capital and experienced builders to build out suites of solutions bringing platforms into the world of privacy tech.

In the larger technology ecosystem, Salesforce was the first true 'platform' solving for multiple use cases (CRM, marketing, support) with a single-login. Today, we see a handful of platforms in privacy tech that address multiple use cases within a single user login.

Looking at the landscape there are 30-50 privacy tech vendors across all sorts of verticals. G2 and The Rise of Privacy Tech do an OK job of categorizing these vendors. I don't love either list but it's better than no framework.

Frankly, you don't need 50% of these use cases for a typical B2B or B2C company. Unless you're Meta or Google, then you probably don't need homomorphic encryption or differential privacy solutions but I could be swayed.

The key use cases for 90% of companies we have worked with are broken out into two main buckets: Front-Office and Back-Office.

Front-Office:?notice and consent (cookie banners, privacy policy management, consent management); individual rights (intake forms and authentication)

Back-Office:?data mapping; privacy impact assessments

So, this begs the question: when do I go specialized vs platform?

If we oversimplify, your default should be picking a platform provider?UNLESS?any of these use cases are?CORE?to how your business drives revenue.

So what would be core to any business: advertising aka cookies.

The main use case for specialized consent tools, I see, is for Publishers. Their revenues are driven off ad sales (in part) and the technical environment in which publishers operates are extremely complex.

FLLR Consulting just finished implementing 20 websites with cookie banners requiring specialized knowledge in ad tech, IAB TCF, IAB CCPA, pre-bid scripting, tag managers, and more. A generic cookie consent tool is not built to handle this complexity and would cripple an ad based website.

We're seeing three trends in the platform space for you to be aware of:

The first: the push to become a platform. Kind of obvious but worth calling out. A company cannot survive off a single use. Their founders AND investors know this. We are already seeing point solutions adding additional use cases to become that platform of choice.

But why is this?

The second: because companies do no want to manage a new vendor for every use case. As you know, it poses many risks to the organization by working with an uncapped number of vendors. And you can ultimately drive better pricing and service out of a single vendor versus negotiating with five vendors for the same products.

Aka we're doing this to ourselves :D

The third, lesser advertised trend, is privacy tech expanding their focus into security. This will be a whole different topic but the net of that thinking is security has bigger budgets. Pretty simple. Privacy is still struggling to find budget to buy the tools they need but security is, largely, well funded and knows how to be buy software. So vendors are naturally going where the money is and that's good for companies. It means your vendor will last, instead of go bankrupt or stop innovating because they can't afford to invest in the?platform.

Now, do we recommend specific platforms? Absolutely. But more importantly, we can help you find the right platform for your team and implement it properly, the first time.

Well this was fun. I hope this was worth the few megabytes of email space.

Any feedback is appreciated. Really want to make this useful and something you share.

Potential topics for the next few newsletters:?

• The anatomy of the Publishing business - all the tech involved to make it work and how privacy tech plays in
• Upcoming vendor events to be aware of
• Non-negotiable features for each core solution (good for RFPs)

What else should we talk about? Just comment below.