Architect by background.
Builder by nature.

A MarTech Solutions Architect designs the systems, data flows, and integrations that connect marketing technology platforms — CDP, CRM, email, analytics, and automation — into a cohesive stack. They translate business strategy into technical architecture, conduct stack audits, evaluate vendors, and ensure marketing data reaches the teams who need to act on it.

A CDP creates a persistent, unified customer profile by ingesting first-party data from all touchpoints, resolving identity across channels, and making real-time profiles available for personalisation and activation across email, paid media, web, and mobile. Unlike a CRM, it is purpose-built for marketing activation.

A CRM manages known customer relationships for sales and service teams. A CDP is designed for marketing: it resolves customer identity across channels, unifies behavioural and transactional data, and activates profiles in real time. CDPs complement CRMs — Salesforce Data Cloud, for example, acts as a CDP layer on top of the Salesforce ecosystem.

A stack audit covers four phases: inventory (cataloguing every tool and integration), assessment (evaluating against business outcomes and usage), gap analysis (where data breaks down or capabilities are missing), and roadmap (what to retire, consolidate, or replace). A thorough audit also examines organisational ownership and IT–Marketing alignment.

A first-party data strategy is a plan for collecting, governing, and activating data that customers share directly — through purchases, website visits, loyalty programmes. With third-party cookies deprecated, it is now the primary foundation for personalisation. It covers consent management, identity resolution, data quality, and activation architecture.

Engage a MarTech architect when: marketing technology ROI is unclear, customer data is siloed across platforms, you are evaluating a major platform investment (CDP, MAP, CRM), personalisation initiatives are stalling due to data quality issues, or IT and Marketing cannot agree on a shared technical roadmap.

Composable CDP builds customer profiles directly on an existing data warehouse (Snowflake, BigQuery) and uses activation layers (Hightouch, Census, Segment) to push segments to marketing tools. It gives enterprises more data governance control, but requires mature data engineering capability. Best suited to organisations with existing data infrastructure.

Identity resolution matches and merges fragmented customer records — from different devices, channels, and systems — into a single, accurate customer profile. It uses deterministic matching (email, phone, loyalty ID) and probabilistic methods. It is a foundational CDP capability and essential for accurate attribution, personalisation, and cross-channel suppression.

GDPR requires that personal data is collected with a lawful basis — typically consent or legitimate interest — and used only for the purposes stated at collection. For MarTech, this means consent management platforms (CMPs) must gate tracking and data collection, CDPs must honour data subject rights (access, deletion, portability), and personalisation must be built on first-party, consent-based data. Germany enforces GDPR among the strictest in the EU, making privacy-first architecture essential for any organisation operating in the DACH market.

A suite approach uses a single vendor's platform (e.g. Adobe Experience Cloud, Salesforce) for most marketing capabilities, offering deep integration but vendor lock-in. A composable or MACH (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, Headless) stack assembles best-of-breed tools that interoperate via APIs, offering more flexibility but higher integration complexity. The right choice depends on internal data engineering maturity, vendor relationships, and the pace of capability change. Most enterprises benefit from a hybrid: a core platform for orchestration, composable components at the edges.

Engagements start with a free 30-minute discovery call to understand the scope, urgency, and internal constraints. From there, I propose a fixed-scope project (for audits, architecture, and strategy work) or a retainer (for ongoing advisory). Every engagement includes a written deliverable — architecture document, audit report, or vendor evaluation framework — so the output is actionable and usable beyond the engagement itself. Contact: studio@pradhan.is

A MarTech stack audit delivers four outputs: a full inventory of tools, integrations, and data flows; an assessment of each tool's business value and redundancy; a prioritised gap analysis; and a phased modernisation roadmap with estimated effort and sequencing. Most clients use the audit output as the basis for a board-level technology investment decision or to align IT and Marketing on a shared platform roadmap.

Yes. Santosh takes on a limited number of consulting engagements alongside his role at ZEISS. He is available for fixed-scope projects (stack audits, CDP architecture, vendor evaluations) and ongoing advisory retainers. Engagements are primarily remote, with on-site workshops available across the DACH region. To discuss a project, email studio@pradhan.is

Santosh works best with mid-market to enterprise organisations (typically 500+ employees) in Europe — particularly those running Adobe Experience Cloud or Salesforce stacks, or those making their first CDP investment. His enterprise background includes ZEISS, SIXT, Deloitte Digital, BMC Software, and Tata Consultancy Services across manufacturing, mobility, professional services, and enterprise software.