While brands sometimes buy tech for themselves, most tech acquisitions are still by other tech companies who want to expand their scope or snap up a competitor. Verint, which rather grandiosely calls itself “The Customer Engagement CompanyTM” but basically analyzes phone calls, has expanded the old-fashioned way by purchasing Conversocial, which provides messaging tools for human and bot service agents. Price was $50 million.
The News Gods have been mostly on vacation this week, but they did share that casino and events operator Bally’s Corporation is buying Telescope Inc., which builds real-time engagement solutions for live and online events. The deal will bolster Bally’s interactive brands. It’s an example of brands buying technology companies instead of just using their products.
So many companies are offering post-cookie, cross-channel identity solutions that it’s not clear whether a new one really counts as news. But Samba TV does have an interesting story, starting with data from sensors built into smart TVs and extending that through probabilistic matching to identify all devices in a household. They just launched a proprietary identifier, SambaID, which will let advertisers buy and measure deduplicated household-level audiences across digital devices.
IT teams spend lots of time on repetitive requests from business users, finds this TeamDynamix survey. You might think the implication is IT should let users do more for themselves. But the main time-wasters are things like password resets, employee on-boarding, and managing credentials, which can’t really be delegated. And here’s the kicker: IT professionals automate those tasks by building sloppy, insecure, undocumented scripts, just like the non-professionals. Fun fact: 53% of teams manage 100 or more applications.