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.

Salesforce’s Dreamforce mega-conference is next week and the company’s publicity elves are already working overtime.  In the first of what are sure to be daily announcements this week, the company announced 100+ industry-specific prompts, data models, and AI capabilities across its fifteen industry clouds.  It also launched an AI Use Case Library to house its industry-specific AI offerings.