Tech analysis firm Forrester has agreed to buy B2B advisory SiriusDecisions for $245 million. Forrester says the deal doubles its potential market by adding operational expertise to Forrester’s strategic consulting. Sirius is expected to add approximately $100 million revenue in 2019, giving the deal a 2.5x revenue multiple. It’s a ratio similar to Forrester’s own $820 million market capitalization on about $340 million revenue.
By now you’ve seen plenty of reports about record-breaking online sales during the post-Thanksgiving Black Friday-to-Cyber-Monday period. But you might still be surprised that Facebook and Facebook-owned Instagram drove 94% of all social traffic to retail sites. So says a report from Salesforce drawing from data captured in its systems. What, you thought Salesforce couldn’t see its client data? Don’t be silly.
Doubtful that technologists are really in charge of CX? Maybe you’re right: a CMO Council and IBM survey found that 61% said marketing owned customer experience strategy. Just 13% of respondents were CMOs while 61% were CEO, President, or COO. So less bias in that audience than you might expect. Only 20% said they had real-time access to all relevant customer data across the organization. Technology gaps were the most common obstacle to removing data silos (53%), although talent (48%) and time (45%) were close behind.
Disney has agreed to license more than 200 characters, costumes, and environments (but not voices or talent likenesses) to OpenAI for Sora, its gen AI video platform. This is highly unusual for Disney, which generally sues AI models for copyright infringement; in fact, it sued Google for that a day before announcing the OpenAI deal. Disney will also invest $1 billion in OpenAI, nicely illustrating how very eager they are to join the AI party.