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.

If you still think that MCP stands for Male Chauvinist Pig, well, the 1970’s want their disco ball back. Today’s hep cats know that MCP stands for Model Context Protocol, a new-but-widely supported standard that lets large language models access structured data as context for their prompts. Early adopters include Salesforce and Adobe, and search platform Algolia is now using it to feed their data to customer-facing real-time AI agents.