CMO's top 10 martech stories for the week - 23 May 2019

All the latest martech and adtech news this week from CM Group, Adobe, Amazon, Talend, Pegasystems, Informatica, Curiious, Qualtrics, Acquia, BigCommerce, InMoment and IntelligenceBank.

CM Group completes US$410 million in financing

CM Group, a family of marketing technology companies including Campaign Monitor, Delivra, Emma, Liveclicker and Sailthru, has completed a US$410 million financing, providing capital for future acquisitions to accelerate growth, plus the acquisition of Vuture, a cross-channel marketing platform for legal and professional service providers.

Vuture brings further vertical-specific features, functionality, and expertise to CM Group, as well as nearly 400 new customers, including Herbert Smith Freehills and the Big Four consulting firms. 

“At CM Group, we are on a mission to build a portfolio of customer-focused email and multichannel technologies,” said CM Group CEO, Wellford Dillard. “This mission is driven by the fact there are over 7000 martech companies in the space today, making it nearly impossible for marketers to navigate the technology buying process with confidence. CM Group’s portfolio approach allows us to work collaboratively with marketers to match them with the right platform based on their specific needs.

"With its focus on professional services, high customer satisfaction, and product breadth, Vuture is a perfect fit for our family of brands.”

Vuture’s platform goes beyond email marketing and automation, offering technology for event management, content management, payments, alumni tracking, and surveys.

The acquisition of Vuture bolsters CM Group’s presence in existing markets including London, New York, and Sydney. Following the acquisition of Vuture, CM Group will have over 600 employees and 300,000 customers, as all employees of Vuture will remain active in the company.

CM Group’s acquisition of Vuture closed in May 2019, following the January announcement of acquiring Liveclicker and Sailthru.

Adobe collaborates with Amazon

Adobe has announced Magento Commerce branded stores for Amazon sellers, a new offering available through Magento, part of Adobe Experience Cloud, that runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The solution is designed to give sellers a seamless way to grow their business and manage their online presence across Amazon.com and their own storefront. Native integration with Amazon.com merchant tools like Amazon Pay and Fulfillment by Amazon provide the added convenience of secure payments and fast shipping services for shoppers.

With Magento Commerce, the new offering is built to deliver faster page load times and better conversions, as well as the ability to scale for peak shopping periods such as Black Friday. Serverless operations means new features such as one-click checkout and dynamic media can be quickly deployed. Functionality from Amazon Pay provides the same secure payment experience as Amazon.com, with security and compliance baked in.

Talend Partners with Analytics8 and Snowflake 

Talend and Analytics8, a system integrator specialising in data and analytics consultancy, announced a solution to generate trusted insights faster. The Acceler8 solution is built on Snowflake, the data warehouse built for the cloud. Designed by data modellers, the new framework translates available data into workable designs to deliver higher quality data integration in less time and at a lower cost.

The Acceler8 framework aims to help companies leverage data as a true strategic asset by generating reliable insights faster and with greater agility. Taking advantage of the latest cloud and data integration technologies, the new framework eliminates the complexity of generating transparent and trusted information by achieving high-quality data integration in less time and at a lower cost. 

The new joint technology offers all businesses a unique framework to fast-track and secure the building of a governed cloud data warehouse. Allowing users to capture, store, and interpret large quantities of data, resulting in timely, insightful action. This is made possible by uniting diverse data sources, enabling self-service, and safeguarding data through governance.

Pegasystems acquires digital messaging platform provider In The Chat

Pegasystems has acquired In The Chat (ITC), an enterprise-grade digital customer service platform provider that unifies text messaging, social media, live chat, email, messengers, and chatbots into a conversation with customers. 

ITC’s platform, which enables communications via virtually any digital channel, will be integrated with Pega’s AI-powered customer engagement solutions, providing clients a future-proof way to connect with customers.

“In The Chat’s technology and the talented employees behind it will bring valuable new capabilities to our customer engagement solutions,” said Pegasystems SVP of products, Kerim Akgonul. “We look forward to debuting the new solution at PegaWorld this year.”

Informatica announces support for Microsoft Common Data Model

Informatica, an enterprise cloud data management business, announced it supports the Microsoft Common Data Model (CDM), which enables organisations to bridge data silos across applications, modernise data analytics at scale, and accelerate the transformation of raw data into trusted business intelligence. 

Microsoft’s CDM aims to simplify data management and application development by unifying data into a known form and applying structural and semantic consistency across multiple applications and deployments. Informatica’s support of the CDM allows customers to use the Informatica Intelligent Data Platform, powered by the CLAIRE engine, to leverage AI to optimise data quality, harmonise data semantics, and manage data at scale, across multiple enterprise applications.

Curiious lands $2m funding round

Curiious, a communication, technology and content company, announced it closed a $2 million funding round from a core group of investors to provide growth capital and areas of expertise, as it looks to globally scale its multi-user, immersive learning and collaboration platform.

The investment coincides with the official launch of its virtual reality platform, Curiious IQ; a VR education and training platform set to change the way businesses, institutions and individuals learn and collaborate.

It is enabled for VR devices of any kind, allowing people to access a platform of shared learning experiences, and live working spaces. Curiious IQ can stream live to small groups or up to 50 or more headsets simultaneously. Users see each other as avatars in the virtual space allowing for interaction and collaboration on tasks and challenges.

Each experience can be seamlessly managed by a facilitator who can control, manipulate and annotate live into the virtual space from a single device such as a tablet or a smart screen. The result is a platform that leverages the power of Virtual Reality to create an easy-to-use, flexible and interactive tool that is designed to empower both the learning and teaching experience.

Qualtrics launches on-demand learning platform

Qualtrics has officially launched Experience Basecamp, an on-demand learning platform designed to help organisations rapidly build Experience Management (XM) expertise and is immediately available to all Qualtrics customers.

Experience Basecamp helps users master XM products, including CustomerXM, EmployeeXM and Research Core, which measure and improve the four core experiences of business — customer, employee, product, and brand.

Experience Basecamp puts learning into the hands of users with online video courses created by Qualtrics subject matter experts. The material equips Qualtrics customers with the skills to build customer experience, employee experience, and research programs. The learn-at-your-own-pace resource includes over 30 hours of training and 60 courses, all focused on XM methodology and program best practices.

Acquia delivers open source framework for contextual commerce   

Acquia has unveiled the Acquia Commerce Framework, a set of open source Drupal modules that brands can use to deliver contextual commerce experiences. 

These open source modules aim to provide flexibility to embed commerce components directly into content-driven experiences, helping remove friction from the commerce process.  

As a result rich, omnichannel shopping experiences can emerge from content building efforts quickly, without having to assemble troves of data or build complicated navigation paths.   

Within Drupal, site builders can create as many virtual catalogues as they need using custom connectors, linking product data to content. Brands can tap the benefits of open source technology to create a smoother shopping experience – connecting customers with lively, useful content and clear, actionable checkout options. Authors can easily embed this product data directly into the content they are creating, which is the basis for contextual commerce.

InMoment receives strategic growth investment from Madison Dearborn Partners

InMoment has received a strategic growth investment from funds advised by Madison Dearborn Partners, LLC (MDP), a private equity firm based in Chicago. MDP has acquired a majority ownership position in InMoment from existing shareholders, with Peterson Partners, an independent investment firm that first invested in InMoment in 2013, retaining a minority ownership position in the company.

MDP’s sponsorship will enable InMoment to accelerate its growth strategy, which is focused on increasing market adoption and expanding the capabilities of InMoment’s Experience Intelligence (XI) Platform as well as continued geographic expansion in the large and growing customer experience and analytics market.

IntelligenceBank launches Kanban Project View

IntelligenceBank, a marketing operations platform, announced a new Kanban project view that integrates with the software’s creative workflows and enterprise digital asset management tools.

Kanban is a visual system for managing work that clearly illustrates project stages, priorities and owners as well as the actual work progressing through a given process.

Kanban helps manage several tasks in a single project or multiple projects as it provides an easy view of who is doing what and when. It’s flexible and provides early warning of potential bottlenecks and great insight for future efficiencies.

IntelligenceBank has integrated Kanban with its creative workflows and enterprise-grade digital asset management modules. This means marketers have a direct link between the project, an audit trail of approvals and their creative assets.

Follow CMO on Twitter: @CMOAustralia, take part in the CMO conversation on LinkedIn: CMO ANZ, join us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CMOAustralia, or check us out on Google+:google.com/+CmoAu   

 

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