Agile development methods may reduce the chances of deploying a central customer database, according to a survey just released by the CDP Institute. But companies that combined agile methods with long term plans had more databases than companies that used either method by itself. Read the blog, download the report, and form your own opinions.

Speaking of acquisitions, GE Digital recently spent $915 million to buy cloud-based field service technology company ServiceMax, $153 million for Internet of Things data integration specialist Bit Stew, and an undisclosed amount for machine learning expert Wise.io. This is all intended to build its equipment monitoring business but if you don’t think equipment data can be transformed into customer insights, you might want to think again.

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.