CMO's top 8 martech stories for the week - 27 February 2020

All the latest martech and adtech news this week from Salesforce, Confirmit, BlueVenn, Leanplum, QMS Media, Automation Anywhere, Verint and Adobe, and NetOpt

Salesforce buys Vlocity for US$1.33 billion

Salesforce has used its latest earnings announcement to reveal the acquisition of Vlocity, a cloud and app solutions provider, for US$1.33 billion.

In a statement, Salesforce chairman and co-CEO, Marc Benioff, said Vlocity had been strong partner for the past six years, building industry-specific add-ons to its core CRM platform.

“The work we’ve done together with our customers has been extraordinary and with this acquisition, it will be easier than ever for us to deliver powerful industry solutions to our customers by every vertical,” he said. As part of the deal, Vlocity CEO, David Schmaier, joins Salesforce.

The deal follows up from Salesforce’s recent acquisition of Tableau last June for a whopping US$15.7 billion.

Confirmit to merge with Dapresy 

Global customer experience (CX), employee experience and market research platform, Confirmit, will merge with data visualisation reporting firm, Dapresy. 

Specialist growth equity investor, Verdane, which is the major investor in Dapresy, just announced it had acquired Confirmit and would merge the two businesses. Confirmit and Dapresy already share many clients, and Verdane said customers of both companies will benefit from further investment in existing products, and a seamless integration between Confirmit’s solutions and Dapresy’s reporting. 

The new platform is projected to provide an efficient, end-to-end solution that delivers accelerated customer value. Confirmit has a history of mergers and acquisitions, including Pulse Train, CustomerSat, Techneos, Integrasco and IRM. Verdane is joined by Zobito, the equity growth investor, as co-investor. The Zobito team will bring its go-to-market expertise and experience from working with companies such as QlikView to the journey. 

BlueVenn launches CDP-powered email channel

Customer data platform (CDP), BlueVenn, has launched a new email channel within its omnichannel marketing hub, which enables users to design, execute and automate more targeted and personalised email communications and combine email marketing with other online and offline channels.

BlueVenn already integrates with the majority of the world's email marketing platforms through bi-directional connectors and API integrations that allow the execution of email communications and ingest the resulting clicks, opens and results to trigger next actions in other channels. BlueVenn's release of its own CDP-powered email marketing module offers customers extra choice and the ability to personalise content with more granularity.

Leanplum raises US$27 million in funding round

Multi-channel customer engagement platform, Leanplum, has raised an additional US$27 million as an extension of its Series D funding round.

The latest funding round was led by Norwest Venture Partners and Shasta Ventures, with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Canaan, and Launchub. It will be used to bolster Leanplum's product development and go-to-market efforts.

The company also announced leadership changes, with the appointment of George Garrick as president and CEO, and Sheri Huston as chief financial officer.

QMS Media launch new data platform

Digital outdoor media company, QMS Media, has launched DynamicIQ, a new data platform it says will redefine out-of-home insights and measurement.

It is the result of the partnership between mobility data and intelligence solution provider, DSpark, and audience modelling specialists, Wejugo, to create the data and insights platform.

DynamicIQ collects and processes billions of anonymised and aggregated mobile network data points from a third of Australia’s population. This data gives advertisers accurate and usable insights, based on real data and analysed by hour, day, week or month. The platform also enables intelligent data and dynamic creative messaging.

Automation Anywhere launches Discovery Bot

Robotic process automation outfit, Automation Anywhere says it has launched the first integrated process discovery solution Discovery Bot to identify and automate highest return on investment (ROI) business processes.

Automation Anywhere Discovery Bot uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to capture and analyse user actions to uncover common, repetitive process steps as employees navigate between business applications. It then prioritises automation opportunities by potential ROI and creates bots to automate them and accelerate the process automation journey.

The intelligent, automatic process discovery technology, built on top of the company’s cloud-native intelligent automation platform, leverages years of investment in robotic process automation, AI and machine learning to increase the pace of process discovery and automation. Automation Anywhere says it’s a zero-client solution, which can be deployed across the enterprise for users, IT and developers to collaborate via the same web-based interface and reduce the time spent understanding business process workflows.

Verint and Adobe enter into new partnership 

Verint and Adobe have combined their cloud forces on new personalised customer journeys. The partnership brings the Verint Experience Cloud, its omnichannel experience management, together with the Adobe Experience Cloud, enabling companies to leverage customer experience data seamlessly to automate the process of predicting and acting on experience drivers.

The new arrangement will enable organisations to leverage customer experience data to automate the process of predicting and acting on experience drivers, with the goal of anticipating and meeting customer needs. Companies can automate and take action on real-time insights across every level of the organisation and prioritise improvements based on desired impacts.

NetOpt launches Pick'n'Watch

NetOpt has launched a new Internet of Things (IoT) tool, Pick'n'Watch, which is designed to enhance in-store experience for customers when they touch a product with content, such as  video, images, hot products, deals and how-to’s.

Pick'n'Watch also enables management to analyse and gain insights into stores across the country from a central location. It uses machine learning for physical stores to analyse all the stores and provide data from a central location, including which products were touched, and how many times, where, when, how long picked up and by whom; and conversion rates of touched vs. sold products.

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