Lots of personalization industry news today, Dear Reader. Retail-oriented analytical CDP Manthan and recommendation engine RichRelevance have announced a “path to consolidating” pending regulatory approvals. The firms will start joint sales and marketing right away. If this sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because analytical CDP Amperity bought recommendation engine Custora just yesterday.
Sorry the newsletter is so late today, Dear Reader. It’s a long story involving electrical connectors, eggnog, and a moose. But you wouldn’t be interested. Instead, we have the third acquisition of an AI-based predictive tool by a CDP vendor in the past week. This time it’s Netcore, a messaging platform with a CDP inside, purchasing Boxx.ai, a personalization and recommendation engine. Definitely a trend going on here.
We have a couple of other, small martech acquisitions today: opportunity manager Costello by sales engagement platform SalesLoft and procurement management system Scout RFP by administration platform Workday. But we won’t mention them. Instead, here’s completion of a $430 million acquisition by pharm industry services company Veeva. Target is Crossix, which compiles medical and other data on more than 300 million people in the U.S. and uses it to measure and optimize marketing campaigns to consumers and health professionals.
With CDP vendors increasing their workforces by 3.4% in six months, compared with an average of 0.2% each six months over the prior two years, the sector seems to be growing again, according to our own semi-annual industry update. There is much talk of composable CDPs but they still employ no more than 5% of the sector workforce. What is a clear trend is the acquisition of independent CDPs by vendors interested in adding a CDP to a larger system (usually an activation system).