While brands sometimes buy tech for themselves, most tech acquisitions are still by other tech companies who want to expand their scope or snap up a competitor.  Verint, which rather grandiosely calls itself “The Customer Engagement CompanyTM” but basically analyzes phone calls, has expanded the old-fashioned way by purchasing Conversocial, which provides messaging tools for human and bot service agents.  Price was $50 million.

Martech stacks changed more in the past year than the three previous years combined, say 77% of marketers in this Sitecore survey.  But the silver lining has a cloud: 72% said most of the changes were short-term fixes that will have to be cleaned up in the future.  Oh, and most of that martech innovation was aimed at moving technology to the cloud, while customer loyalty, personalization, and integration got reduced attention.

Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.