For no obvious reason, today brings three investments in collaboration systems. Start with purchase of a majority share in work management platform Wrike by Vista Equity Partners. Vista – or VEP to its friends – has bought quite a few well known martech companies, including Marketo, Xactly, and Cvent.

More turmoil: Alliance Data announced it is seeking “strategic alternatives”, including a sale, for its $2.2 billion Epsilon marketing and data subsidiary. Alliance Data is approaching $8 billion revenue with a market cap of $10.6 billion or 1.3x revenue.

Just over half of consumers (54%) like to receive personalized messages because they show the consumers are known to the brand, plus they can be time savers. The rest (46%) find it at best unimportant, at worst creepy. Relevance far outstrips personalization when it comes to driving email opens (54% vs. 19%). Takeaway: treat each customer the way they prefer.