Several readers have expressed concern for Jamie, our Department of the Obvious intern who was reprimanded last week for publishing without permission. He’s fine, folks. To show there’s no hard feelings we’ve let him submit this study from retail email specialist Bluecore. Key findings included that buyers are interested in products they’ve looked at before and that they like price decreases. Some other, less obvious data here as well.
Oracle has added real-time streaming Web analytics (Oracle Infinity) and advanced audience segmentation (Oracle CX Audience) to its CX Cloud. Descriptions of both products tout customer data unification across silos, although CX Cloud already has a separate Customer Data Management Cloud that builds and exposes a consolidated master profile. There’s also the Data Cloud, their Data Management Platform (DMP) that includes both known and anonymous identities.
The focus on monetizing personal data arguably misses the point, which is that consumers want to control the data itself. Sovrin Foundation uses blockchain to give users a self-controlled credential to verify their identity in digital signatures. It conceives of itself as a “global public utility”. Cool. The Foundation just announced support from IBM, which joins a number of other, much smaller “founding stewards”.
Salesforce has reversed course on its bid to acquire data management and integration platform Informatica a source has told Reuters. Informatica itself said that it is not in talks to be acquired. Salesforce stocks rose on this latest news while Informatica’s fell.