If Adobe’s $1.68 billion acquisition of Magento failed to get you thinking about open source systems, then IBM’s $34 billion deal for Red Hat surely did. So maybe you’ll be interested in open source CRM vendor X2Engine’s release of an enhanced marketing automation layer. The X2 platform includes marketing, sales, service, digital, quotes, social monitoring, collaboration, and document management. Prices start at $35 per month per user and they claim more than 40,000 deployments worldwide.

While we’re on the topic, data vendor Zeotap has also announced an identity solution, uncreatively named Connect. They use telecom data to link emails and phone numbers from CRM systems to device IDs and cookies on mobile and desktop devices. It’s a deterministic match, meaning that connections between IDs are provided from external sources, not inferred from device attributes and behaviors.

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.