Zoom has announced a deal to buy cloud contact center company Five9 for $14.7 billion (with a B) in stock. The price is an astronomical 34x Five9’s $425 million revenue and nearly 5x Zoom’s own revenue. Zoom sees the deal as giving it a firmer foothold in the enterprise communications market, although Five9 is far from the market leader.
One billion dollars is pocket change at Facebook, which just pledged that amount to content creators in an eye-catching headline. But the reality is less impressive: the money is spread across two years and among several convoluted Facebook and Instagram programs. TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube already have similar programs involving hundreds of millions of dollars, so if Facebook hopes to buy its way to dominance, they’ll have to try harder.
The build vs buy debate isn’t over. More than half of companies are either entirely (16%) or partly (38.5%) building their own “customer/marketing data platform”, according to this survey of UK and EU CMOs by Martech Alliance for Treasure Data. Fewer were stitching together best-of-breed vendor solutions (32.5%) and just 10.5% were relying on a single vendor’s integrated marketing suite. Perhaps related: just 20% have fully connected customer profiles and 48% say their company fails to meet customer expectations for a unified experience.
Microsoft has confirmed that Reddit has blocked its Bing search engine from crawling content; Reddit seems to have blocked DuckDuckGo too. Reddit content will still appear in Google search results, but then Google has paid Reddit $60 million to allow it to train its AI models on that content. Reddit says the block has nothing to do with the Google deal: okay.