It’s hard to imagine that anyone who reads this newsletter hasn’t already heard, but Adobe announced an agreement yesterday to purchase B2B marketing automation vendor Marketo for $4.75 billion. Seller was Vista Equity Partners, which bought Marketo in May 2016 for $1.8 billion. Adobe gets 5,000 customers in B2B marketing, where it has had little presence. Adobe comments suggest Marketo will stay separate from Campaign, Adobe’s B2C marketing automation system.

CDP vendor RedPoint Global has released a packaged solution for retail banking, its latest industry-specific solution. Components include single customer view, retail banking data model and templates, turnkey connectors for marketing channels, preconfigured reports, and real time decision tools. It runs on the Microsoft Azure platform.

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).