CDP Institute

It’s also no surprise that a Vidyard study finds 93% of B2B marketers consider video at least somewhat valuable. More surprising: just 28% of respondents say their videos are very effective. The authors at Heinz Marketing have provided lots of practical advice for making things better. Worth a look.

Let’s focus on B2B marketing today. We have a very interesting report on Request for Proposal (RFP) management from Loopio. Are you surprised that RFPs account for 27% of software sales revenue vs 41% across all industries? More here on RFP challenges, timelines, and the age-old question: How many SMEs does it take to answer an RFP?

You haven’t been very interested in generic data management technology, Dear Reader. But it can supplement or compete with a CDP. Therefore: self-service data preparation vendor Paxata has been purchased by self-service machine learning vendor DataRobot. The deal will make it easier to prepare training data – a common role for a CDP.

This IDG Connect study for Snow Software found that most IT managers have accepted self-service technology: 67% said at least half their spend is controlled by business units and 78% said the shift is a positive development for their organizations. But it’s not all cherry pie: 32% feel they’re held responsible for things they can’t control.

Security worries could put IT back in control. Software-as-a-service enables much self-service IT but just 19% of IT executives said 75% of their SaaS vendors meet all security requirements, according a Pulse Q&A survey for Archive360. Three quarters don’t control encryption keys with a majority of their SaaS vendors and 63% expect to retire SaaS applications that don’t provide that control.

Acquia announced yesterday that it will purchase CDP vendor AgilOne. The deal is part of Acquia’s strategy to expand beyond its base in Web content management to become a full-scale marketing cloud. Acquia bought marketing automation platform Mautic earlier this year and was itself purchased by Vista Equity Partners. See this post for CDP Institute founder David Raab’s comments on the deal.

7Park Data also happens to be owned by Vista Equity Partners, which purchased it last December. 7Park’s primary business is assembling and selling data on topics including IT expenditures, app engagement, and smart TV viewership. They just released a data preparation platform based (presumably) on their data assembly tools. Features include identity matching, data cleansing, and creation of unified customer profiles. Not a CDP but it could help to build a home-grown alternative.

Sticking with data management: natural language processing vendor Luminoso has launched the next generation of its product, QuickLearn 2.0 QuickLearn’s special skill is automatically learning domain-specific terminology without training, setup, or ontology-building. This allows much faster deployment than conventional methods. The trick is the system is already trained on general language processing using text from the Web.

It’s a light news day, Dear Reader, so I’ll stoop to some mild click-baiting with a minor item that puts Adobe in the headline. That being: Adobe has added AMP support to its Campaign email engine. AMP is an open standard that lets emails contain interactive elements such as forms and dynamically updated content. That’s legitimately interesting, although Adobe isn’t the only vendor to support it.

We also have a $60 million Series D funding for cross-channel messaging platform Iterable, bringing their total to $140 million. Iterable assembles customer profiles from multiple sources but it doesn’t share them externally, so it’s not a CDP.

Let’s finish with a survey. IDG found that, true to stereotype, IT buyers’ favorite content is product information: tests, reviews, demonstrations, and literature. They’re much less interested in case studies, how-to content, ROI calculators, and opinion columns. They’re also not very interested in market research, so I’ll stop right here.

I was all set to make fun of WalkMe for calling itself a “digital adoption platform” as if that were an actual software category – only to find it really is one: TrustRadius lists a dozen products in the field. These systems watch user behavior and make suggestions to help them learn new products. WalkMe just raised $90 million, bringing its total funding to $307 million.