Data management software vendor Precisely, which just Monday announced acquisition of Winshuttle, is back in the news with a new self-service digital engagement platform called EngageOne Communicate. This moves them out of the IT department to let business users design and deliver real-time customer interactions. Channels include personalized interactive video, chatbots, email, SMS, and “dynamic PDFs”, which include barcodes and QR codes.
We have a hefty bucket of vendor news today, Dear Reader. First up: cross-channel marketing platform Iterable has closed a $200 million Series E, bringing total funding to $342 million. They offer email, SMS, app messaging, real-time personalization, and a unified customer data store to tie it all together.
E-commerce platform BigCommerce has added Big Open Data Solutions, which lets users send customer, order, and product catalog data to other systems including Google BigQuery and the Twilio Segment CDP. Additional integrations connect with analytics, business intelligence, and personalization systems. The BigQuery integration might let BigCommerce qualify as a CDP in its own right, but it doesn’t seem to collect data from other systems.
It’s deal-making time for generative AI model builders and publishers who can provide them with quality data. Germany publishing giant Axel Springer is trading access to its data for Microsoft adtech, AI, and Azure hosting solutions. Meanwhile, The Financial Times has struck a deal with OpenAI to license its content with attribution of summaries and quotes.