Salesforce has continued its string of acquisitions with the purchase of data management platform vendor Krux, in a deal worth about $700 million in cash and stock. The Krux acquisition wasn't formally announced by the company, but comes at the start of Salesforce's massive Dreamforce event, where more details will surely be shared this week.
Krux CEO Tom Chavez, however, did share some details in a blog post:
As a part of the Salesforce ecosystem, we’ve had the opportunity to work closely with the Salesforce team to create integrations that make our customers even more successful. Beyond the strategic and technology fit, we believe our companies’ core values, which include innovation, trust, transparency, and most importantly customer success, are in perfect alignment and offer an exciting foundation upon which we can continue building the industry’s smartest Marketing Cloud.
We’re better together. Krux will extend the Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s audience segmentation and targeting capabilities to power consumer marketing with even more precision, at scale. In addition, Krux will feed Salesforce Einstein with billions of new signals, enabling companies to be even smarter about their customers. Krux and Salesforce together will empower every company to deliver more relevant and valuable consumer experiences across every touchpoint.
Krux will continue to support its partners and integrate "with a wide variety of platforms," Chavez added.
Like other DMPs, marketers use Krux's platform to store and analyze large amounts of first-party and third-party consumer data in hopes of fine-tuning their marketing campaigns through better segmentation and individualized targeting. DMPs work in conjunction with DSPs (demand-side platforms), which marketers use to manage their ad buying.
Krux also offers Link, which connects companies interested in buying data with ones who are selling it. While Salesforce has long invested in marketing and advertising-related technology with acquisitions such as ExactTarget and Buddy Media, Link brings the company something it had been missing. It also brings it in closer parity with rival Oracle, which bought Krux competitor BlueKai all the way back in February 2014.
Oracle has also positioned its own DaaS (data as a service) product set for more than just marketing. Its upcoming "intelligent" business applications will also be able to tap some 5 billion consumer and business profiles for insights, Oracle says.
It remains to be seen how and how quickly Salesforce is able to integrate Krux's platform with Einstein, which is being formally launched only this week at Dreamforce. However, there are clear synergies, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Cindy Zhou. "Every launch of AI right now includes use cases in marketing," she says :It is the quickest value proposition to tie AI and data to perform engaging, personalized offers to customers."
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