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Customer Data Platforms Customer Experience Web Content Management

2020 Year in review (Part 1)

Clearly, 2020 has been a year unlike any other (at least in my working lifetime). Interestingly, while the “real world” has been turned upside down by the covid-19 pandemic, much of the marketing technology landscape remains either unchanged, or accelerated. Let’s start by looking back… 2020 predictions revisited In September 2019, I wrote a post […]

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Web Content Management

Salesforce CMS now out of beta

First reported at TechTarget: “Salesforce CMS now generally available” the release coincided with the overall Salesforce Winter ’20 update. So what does this mean in practice, particularly for Sitecore customers, where they have had a “strategic partnership” with Salesforce for two years. First, this is not unexpected – the CMS beta and roadmap had been […]

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Customer Data Platforms

Vertical acquisition and integration is the new martech play

Earlier this year, McDonalds paid $300 million dollars for Dynamic Yield, a somewhat surprising fit for a fast-food giant and a tech company known for dynamic pricing and personalization. Just this week, MasterCard acquired SessionM, a Customer Data Platform (CDP)/loyalty program vendor (value disclosed, but based on $100 million in investment rounds and some industry […]

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Web Content Management

WCM systems are the hot new billionaire status symbol of 2019

Marc Benioff personally owns Time Magazine and via Salesforce Ventures, has a few million dollars invested in various WCM companies, including Bloomreach, Contentful and now $12 million in Automattic (Benioff owns 4% of Salesforce shares and they made a $300 million investment in Automattic). That may seem like a lot, but it pales in comparison […]

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Web Content Management

“Missing parts of the experience of WP VIP as a full WCM”

After the announcement of Salesforce Ventures investing an astonishing $300 million in Automattic last week, I wrote extensively on the topic and in particular the impact on potential strategic partnership between Salesforce and Automattic, given that WCM is still a gap in their portfolio. I concluded (and other smart folks in the industry agreed) that: […]

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Web Content Management

Some thoughts on Salesforce and Automattic

Well, the most exciting news in WCM in a while has dropped today, with the announcement that Salesforce Ventures is investing $300 million in Automattic (aka WordPress) for a valuation of $3 billion dollars. For comparison, any other WCM vendor has been valued at far less than this in the past. Most recently, the big […]

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Web Content Management

Predictions for 2020

Two analyst firms have put out some predictions for the future of WCM earlier this year; Mark Grannan from Forrester wrote a report entitled “Coming Soon: Agile Content Curation And Orchestration Will Redefine CMS” with the catchy subtitle “It’s The End Of Web CMS As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”. There is a […]