CDP Institute

Message personalization vendor Movable Ink has raised a $55 million Series D, bringing total funding to $97 million.  The company has been on a tear recently, adding more than 100 new employees so far this year, expanding across Europe, and acquiring message selection engine Coherent Path.

Mediafly offers a collection of B2B sales training, interactive content, and forecasting tools, based mostly on acquisitions.  They just expanded their collection by buying ExecVision, which uses conversational intelligence to develop sales coaching plans.

I don’t know how many barroom brawls have started as debates over vertical vs horizontal integration, but BARC is pulling no punches in this attack on horizontal business intelligence.  They blame it for over-centralization, loss of flexibility, and the growth of poorly-governed “shadow BI”.  BARC favors vertical (that is, department-specific) BI and sees machine learning as the key to self-service “data democratization”.  Interesting insights.