Worries about data security are well founded: 52% of U.S. retailers experienced a data breach in the past year, according to the Thales Data Threat Report. The number more than doubled from 19% the previous year. Lots of details including comparison of U.S. retail breach rates to global rates. Guess who has more breaches?
Personalization engine (and CDP) SessionM announced $23.8 million in new funding, with Salesforce Ventures as a lead investor. Coming on the heels of Salesforce’s Datorama acquisition last week, it suggests somebody at Salesforce has a new interest in customer data integration. You may also recall that SessionM expanded its own Salesforce integrations last week. Total funding is now $97.3 million.
No discussion of mobile would be complete without bashing Facebook and other mobile-dominant services. So let’s finish with a report from enterprise mobile threat protection vendor Appthority, which finds that WhatsApp Messenger and Facebook Messenger rare the biggest security threats to enterprises, based on a combination of how widely they’re used and how risky it is to use them. Maybe consumers want to move away from their smartphone for more reasons than inadequate coupons.
CDP mParticle is being acquired by ecommerce platform Rokt for a price of $300 million. It’s the third acquisition of a leading independent CDP in a little over one month, following Uniphore’s purchase of ActionIQ and Contentstack’s purchase of Lytics. All three buyers offer some type of customer-facing technology; apparently they’ve decided that adding real-time profiles from CDP will give them a competitive edge. (See this blog post for more analysis.)