Who Will Own the Rails? Holding Companies, Identity Providers, and Cloud Data Platforms Build Alternative to Walled Gardens
By Rick Erwin, CEO, Adstra
The battle for walled garden interoperability isn’t about media spend anymore – it’s about who controls the infrastructure. While Google, Meta, and Amazon lock down their ecosystems, a parallel universe is being built on neutral ground: cloud data platforms, holding companies, and independent identity providers racing to own the rails that power data collaboration.
The stakes are clear. As signals degrade and privacy scrutiny continues, brands need control of identity resolution, measurement and activation that works with all platform ecosystems and that doesn’t confine them to a single one.
The question is whether the industry can deliver identity composability with simplicity and control, or whether ease of use, fragmentation and integration fatigue will drive marketers back to consolidated platforms.
The Shift from Walled Gardens to Neutral Rails
Cloud data platforms have seized this moment, positioning themselves as infrastructure players who offer neutrality because they don’t compete with adtech or media vendors. They’re building marketplaces where identity providers, measurement partners, and activation tools plug in as composable services.
The pitch is compelling: identity resolution can become a native workflow step inside your cloud environment rather than a separate vendor relationship that adds latency and maintenance overhead. Databricks expanded to multi-party collaboration and cross-cloud availability. Snowflake added Google Ads activation connectors and Snowpark Container Services support.
The result? Cloud data platforms are becoming the default rails for walled garden interoperability – the layer where collaboration, governance, and activation converge.
Holding Companies Race to Own the Middle Layer
Holding companies view identity and clean rooms as strategic assets to control client data workflows and relationships. The value proposition is real: integrated workflows, accountability, and scale across identity, audiences, measurement, and activation – all from a single partner brands already trust.
But the risk is fragmentation disguised as neutrality. A brand working with holding companies might maintain separate identity graphs in WPP’s clean room or Publicis’ walled collaboration space – each with distinct APIs, governance protocols, and onboarding workflows. The operational overhead can dwarf the promise of “neutral infrastructure.”
If every holding company builds its own clean room, does fragmentation get worse before it gets better? The industry risks trading walled gardens for walled railways – new silos with different owners but the same lock-in dynamics.
Independent Identity Providers Adapt to Cloud Distribution
Independent identity providers are shifting from standalone platforms to composable cloud marketplace plug-ins, turning identity into a service that integrates where data already resides. Most now offer privacy-centric identity resolution via cloud-native clean rooms, allowing brands to enrich and activate data without exposure.
This cloud-based distribution model lowers switching costs dramatically. Brands can test and optimize multiple identity providers (now workflow steps rather than vendor relationships) inside environments like Databricks. For identity leaders evaluating infrastructure, this means you can demand match quality, data provenance, latency benchmarks, and compliance transparency without committing to multi-year contracts upfront.
The challenge? Commoditization. As identity becomes a plug-and-play service, providers must differentiate on performance metrics that matter at production scale, not just feature lists that look good in pitch decks.
The Composability vs. Integration Fatigue Debate
Here’s the central tension: composability promises flexibility. Choose best-in-class identity, audiences, measurement, and activation without lock-in. But clean rooms are increasingly described as capabilities marketers use to reach outcomes, not products they buy for their own sake. Brand marketers wake up thinking about conversion rates, lifetime value, and attribution. Infrastructure that seamlessly solves these problems will win.
Walled gardens offer simplicity: one login, one API, one support team. Composable infrastructure requires orchestration, governance, and maintenance. If every partner requires a separate integration, brands may retreat to consolidated platforms just to reduce operational complexity.
Cloud data platforms are fighting this by adding connectors, containers, and activation endpoints – making composability feel more like a single platform. The goal is to deliver modular architecture that doesn’t require a team of engineers to maintain.
For teams evaluating vendors right now, demand clear SLAs, sample datasets, and pilot metrics that show how integration affects latency and costs. Test whether the “composable” promise holds up when you’re running real-time bidding flows at production scale, not just proof-of-concept demos.
Who Wins the Rails?
The winner won’t be the player with the most features or the biggest marketplace – it will be whoever makes composability feel frictionless. If cloud data platforms succeed in removing integration complexity, the rails could become truly neutral: owned by no single player, accessible to all, optimized for outcomes rather than vendor lock-in.
But if fragmentation continues. If brands face integration fatigue across a dozen proprietary systems with incompatible governance models, marketers will retreat to consolidated platforms just to reduce operational drag. The promise of neutral infrastructure will collapse under its own weight.
The industry should demand composability with simplicity, and refuse to accept new silos dressed up as open infrastructure. The rails are being built now. The only question is whether they’ll serve the entire ecosystem, or just the players building them.
