Salesforce is buying robotic process automation (RPA) vendor Servicetrace, which will become part of its MuleSoft integration platform business. RPA lets companies automate existing processes without making changes to underlying systems. It’s been hot as companies seek to improve productivity and agility without making large IT investments. Think of it as a type of no-code development.
We don’t write much about cryptocurrencies because they’re flaky and we are Serious People. Then again, there’s no one more sober than 137-year old NCR, and guess what: they just bought cryptocurrency software provider LibertyX. The deal will ultimately let NCR clients at banks, retailers, and restaurants manage cryptocurrency payments. We are shocked.
The modest ambitions of RPA are far from the grand vision of AI systems that autonomously optimize the entire customer experience. MoEngage sits at the grandiose end of that spectrum, using AI to automatically map the customer journey, discover micro-segments of similar customers, and find the right offer, channel, and timing for each micro-segment at each step. Somebody’s buying: they added more than 250 new customers over the past year and just raised a $32.5 million, bringing total funding to $73 million.
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.