Adverx has just raised $14.5 million for “Customer Relationship Advertising,” which certainly sounds intriguing.  What they do is to generats personalized ads for individuals targeted by business-to-business sales teams, and then maks those ads “passively ‘follow’ each salesperson’s current clients and prospects (pulled from the CRM) as they browse the web and social media”.  Annoying and creepy and it probably works.

CIAM (Customer Identity and Access Management) was once largely about managing employee access to company systems, but it’s increasingly applied to consumer log-ins and identities as well.  This creates an overlap with the identity management systems more traditionally used for customer data.  The expanded market helps to explain why private investor Thoma Bravo just paid $2.8 billion for CIAM vendor Ping Identity, a 60% premium of its most recent stock price and just under 10x revenue.