CDP Segment and 200 of its closest friends have launched the “Platform of Independents”, a collection of companies that pledge to build technology doesn’t lock users into any one CRM platform and makes it easy to share data across departments. Sort of like a CDP is supposed to do.
If your definition of joy is running omni-channel retail on an iPhone, then NewStore is your new best friend. They promise their one system does everything, which may appeal to people who doubt that integrating lots of systems can really be simple. Newstore just raised $20 million in new funding from backers including Salesforce Ventures, bringing their total to $130 million.
Enough about enterprise software. All you Citizen Developers will want to know that Google has just bought AppSheet, a no-code development platform. It can build processes that use data from pretty much any cloud source including Google Sheets, Forms, Maps, and Analytics, as well as non-Google platforms including Salesforce, Dropbox, AWS DynamoDB and MySQL.
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.