B2B predictive analytics vendor Infer has been sold to ESW Capital, which will fold it into ESW’s Ignite Technologies affiliate. Infer assembles business profiles by scanning the Web for news and company information, and combines these with clients’ own marketing automation and CRM data. ESW is on a martech buying spree, having also purchased Infobright DB, Jive, ThinkVine, Placeable and FirstRain in the past year.
Siftery builds a database of which companies use which products, built with information that community members submit about their companies. It has several services that leverage this information to help buyers decide what to purchase based on what similar companies are doing. The latest is addition looks for changes in members’ product stacks and deduces which products most often replace other products. It’s an interesting shortcut but shouldn’t replace the hard work of understanding your requirements and product capabilities.
We can’t discuss customer data without mentioning privacy.
Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.