M&A Archives | According to Fred

It’s a crowded marketing technology space and it gets worse every year. Startups are popping up it seems like every day to combat a specific niche need in the world of today’s digital marketer. To make matters worse (?? – intentional question), the SaaS platforms make it easier for companies to jump in and try/buy/use than ever before. The craziness around it all is that it only gets worse as you get bigger in size. But we also see that best-of-breed platforms are getting used as well, which leads me to the topic for this article. Where do the major digital experience platforms (DXPs) go from here?

Did that say billions?!

I always have some level of surprise when I see the headlines that “So and So” company bought another company for some big price tag. Let’s just use Salesforce and Tableau for example. Any time an acquisition in the MarTech space ends with a “B”, we all take notice. So when Salesforce dropped $15.7B, it’s not just an acquisition, it’s a statement. But like any acquisition, they are made for a reason, and the likely reason is that it fills a gap that the acquiring company has to either fuel further growth or immediate complementary services to add to the bottom line. Thus as you look at all the acquisitions of the last year (and into 2018) of all the major DXPs, you will see a pattern — fill a gap. There are some distinct differences in the gaps being filled and how they fuel further growth for each platform. However, gap filling is the main driver.

The acquisitions of 2019

Here is a quick list of the acquisitions in 2019 by the major DXPs.

Adobe

Allegorithmic – maker of 3d material and texture software
Adobe’s major acquisitions were in 2018 with Sayspring, Uru, Magento and Marketo.

Sitecore

Hedgehog – a professional services company with Sitecore specific IP
Sitecore’s major acquisition of 2018 was StyleLabs, a content marketing software company.

Salesforce

Griddable.io – data synchronization service
MapAnything – location based workflow software
Bonobo AI – conversational software
Tableau – data visualization
ClickSoftware – field service software

Episerver

Insite Software – B2B commerce software
Idio – a content personalization and analytics platform
Episerver was acquired by Insight Venture Partners in 2018, which is fueling the acquisitions in 2019.

Acquia

AgileOne – a customer data platform (CDP)
Cohesion – a low-code/no-code development platform
Mautic – a marketing automation platform
Acquia was acquired by Vista Equity Partners in 2019 as well, which is fueling the growth acquisition strategy as well.

SAP

None. All of their recent acquisitions were in 2018, the biggest and notable being Qualtrics.

Oracle

CrowdTwist – a loyalty software and service provider
Oxygen Systems – a NetSuite SuiteCloud Developer Network partner

OK, we got all that? So if you dig in, clearly the gaps are what is fueling the M&A. Some are rounding out their core offerings. Others are starting to get really niche in what they need to grow with.

So in my opinion, Acquia and Episerver are growing their core offerings to play with more established players such as Adobe and Salesforce. They both had recent ownership changes by private equity and they are fueling the growth needed to expand in their categories as well as grow into new spaces be it upper mid-market or lower enterprise companies.

Adobe’s sole acquisition of 2019 was very specific to content creation and in a world where they want to grow in the upcoming AR/VR space as that takes hold in 2020 and beyond. For Adobe, 2019 and going into 2020 it is all about integrating their big 2018 acquisitions of Magento and Marketo into a holistic platform with the rest of the Adobe Experience Cloud.

Sitecore’s acquisition of Hedgehog turned some heads in their partner ecosystem. Many thought this was going to change their partner relationship. Turns out it wasn’t so much that as it was to gain some proprietary IP and bolster their customer success efforts. The StyleLabs acquisition of 2018 was the big story of gaining a more robust DAM and marketing services technology.

For Salesforce, clearly the big news was the Tableau acquisition. Adding a big set of customers and adding a data visualization solution to their stack turned some heads, but maybe in jealousy rather than the actual acquisition itself. Data is complex. You can make it tell any story. But when you have the right tools to help decision makers make informed decisions, that makes business run faster and more efficiently. The difference of the other acquisitions of Salesforce is that they play in a lot of places with CRM being the hub. So whether it is conversational software or data synchronization or field service software with ClickSoftware, Salesforce is filling in specific gaps, not big ones.

Finally, I threw in SAP and Oracle only because they are big players, but they didn’t make any big noise in 2019. SAP did make some noise with the Qualtrics acquisition in 2018, but time will tell if that was a good move or not in the grand scheme of things.

Where do DXPs go now?

Disclaimer: Ok, this is where I have to make the statement that I work for a company in which we are alliance partners with many of the companies discussed here. However, all the information I’ve shared is public information. The next section is all personal opinion only based on the public information. I do not have insights into any M&A strategy by any of these companies or roadmaps through any of our partner agreements. All of these opinions are that of my own and not my employer.

It’s hard to say exactly where the major DXPs go from here. In some cases, several can fill in more niche gaps from the MarTech landscape. For companies like Adobe who also have other clouds in their product offering such as Advertising Cloud and Document Cloud, the acquisition front could shift to those to increase share of wallet on related services. Adobe Acrobat and Sign are great back-office softwares. Where else can they grow the back-office space? Adobe doesn’t have a CRM, but they do have a strong alliance with Microsoft with growing integrations of their Office 365 suite of services which includes Microsoft Dynamics.

For other companies such as Acquia, Sitecore, and Episerver, the play could be to continue to get to feature parity with Salesforce and Adobe. That’s a tall order as both Adobe and Salesforce play in so many places beyond the typical digital front-end these companies are known for. I personally also think this is why Adobe and Salesforce are public companies and Episerver, Acquia, and Sitecore are all still private. There just isn’t enough of an offering yet to be viable public companies.

For 2020, I think we will say a balance of a few things happen with the major DXPs.

First, those that have a mature offering will focus on integration of their offerings for better customer success and user experience. Marketers want (myself included) solutions that allow us to not have to rely on developers to create everything for us. We want to be able to do stuff on our own and bring in our dev teams as needed for custom experiences and solutions. So bringing these solutions tighter together to allow us to do our jobs better, faster, more efficiently and intelligently will be key.

Second, for the DXPs where they are playing catch up will need to decide how feature parity they want to go, and how they will differentiate themselves. What makes their offerings different than any of the others. Is it simpler to use? Better licensing models? Integrations with one or more of the thousands of other popular MarTech solutions out there?

Third, we will see more M&A. There are still some great solutions out there that are used by thousands of companies that will get gobbled up. I think anything around analytics and insights is fair game. Data visualization is fair game. Customer engagement solutions for better real-time response and data gathering. Really, any platform that is part of the overall customer lifecycle that can add data value to a DXP platform is fair game. Because with all the data privacy and collection laws coming into play, the more the DXPs can own the data source the better.

Final thoughts

I find the MarTech landscape one of the most fascinating spaces in the world of marketing. The technology to allow businesses to discover new audiences, create solutions, market to them, engage, and provide value is nothing short of amazing. It also makes marketing one hell of a tough job in 2020 as well. But as the landscape continues to shift to new channels, ways of engaging customers and prospects change with a changing demographic, the technology needs to keep up too. So whether you make your bet on wearables, voice, AR/VR, 5G, eSports or any of the plethora of channels, the one thing is certain — engaging with a customer base will require technology, data, and creativity. The companies that can offer solutions that fill those areas will find customers. The DXPs that can offer a tightly integrated platform around those areas will also win, but only if it works together and isn’t clunky.

Here’s to 2020 and the rollercoaster ride ahead. Cheers.

This post originally appeared as a LinkedIn published article.

Disclosure: I work for a company that is a Premier partner of Adobe and have partnerships with other vendors mentioned in this article. I do not have access to technical or product roadmaps or have any insights into M&A for any of them. The following is purely my thoughts and opinions and do not represent my employer’s opinion.

Last week Adobe announced that they were purchasing Magento, an eCommerce platform for $1.67Bn. The company has been bought and sold twice previously. eBay bought Magento for $180M, then sold it as part of their enterprise commerce platform to private equity firm Primera. We’ve had a week to digest what this acquisition means for Adobe and their overall Experience Cloud Solutions and what it means for Magento customers, who are primarily not enterprise. Let’s dig in.

The Need for Owning a Commerce Solution

It’s no secret that Adobe needed to do something around a commerce solution. While they have been filling out the other parts of their Experience Cloud with solutions such as voice with Sayspring, video advertising with TubeMogul and user-generated content with LiveFyre, commerce was a place they have flirted with in the past, but never got over the finish line. With a focus on the enterprise market, Adobe over the last decade only had a few options to really pursue — DemandWare, and Hybris. I can only assume Adobe did explore those options but as we know, Salesforce nabbed DemandWare two years ago and Hybris went to SAP five years ago. With those two companies off the market, a big hole was left in the marketplace from an M&A perspective.

Since then, Adobe seemed to focus on the remaining commerce platforms with what appeared to be more integration partnerships while they figured out their next steps. ElasticPath had a run at it, but have now appeared to be strategically aligned to BloomReach. If you look at the Adobe Exchange for their Experience Cloud, you will see there are plenty of commerce vendors that integrate with Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) such as Digital River, Elastic Path, IBM WebSphere Commerce, SAP Hybris, CloudCraze, Agility Multichannel (a PIM system), commercetools, and yes, Magento. So to say that creating commerce experiences within the Adobe Experience Cloud couldn’t be done before is clearly not the case. In fact, companies had options one way or another.

With all of those solutions out there already integrating with the Experience Cloud, why did they need to purchase one? I think there are a few reasons.

It is always better to be in the driver’s seat of any major component of an ecosystem you are either building out or supporting. Many of Adobe’s customers have a commerce component to their Marketing Technology stacks and integration at times only goes so far.
Products and commerce complement each other but are indeed different. While many companies can put product information into AEM and use taxonomies and other metadata to manage the assets, it’s not really built for commerce. It’s meant for content. But when you have product pages and search results, AEM shines. So like peanut butter and jelly, they need to go together.
Their customers were asking for it. There are plenty of Adobe customers who own the entire Experience Cloud, but when it came to this part of their needs, customers had to go elsewhere. While that isn’t always the case and not everyone needs commerce, at the enterprise level which is where they play the most, many do.
More revenue. At the end of the day, it is a missing piece of revenue from a subscription model for their software. So grab that last piece of the pie.

Looking at these tools above who are already integrating into the Experience Cloud, really only one tool could have been viable for an acquisition, and that was Magento. The acquisition does still raise a few eyebrows for a few reasons, but none that haven’t already been overcome by Adobe in the past.

PHP or Java or Cloud or What?

When we first heard about the acquisition in our office some of the first reactions were, “well isn’t Magento PHP based?” And it is. Even Forrester analyst Ted Schadler raised the question on Twitter.

Adobe finally found a commerce platform to buy. I like that it’s plugging a hole, particularly for manufacturers just starting out in commerce. But tell me how PHP/cloud Magento and Java/to-the-datacenter-born AEM are going to integrate? – @TedSchadler

So the short answer that I think all of us are responding with is clearly it will be API based….for now. There is a precedence at Adobe to purchase non-Java based solutions and spend the time and energy to rebuild them in Java and the most recent and still dual code-based solution is Adobe Campaign. When Adobe bought Neolane years ago it was a .NET solution and a fat client even. What is now Adobe Campaign “Classic” is still this .NET solution. The new Adobe Campaign Standard is the rebuilt Java/cloud-based solution that is working towards seamless integration with the rest of the Experience Cloud. (Also, again one of those situations where Adobe didn’t have a lot of choices after other email campaign tools such as ExactTarget and SilverPop were picked up by other companies). Whether Adobe decides to rebuild Magento into a Java/Cloud solution is yet to be seen. It could if it wanted to.

Headless is the New Black

Notice I didn’t say eCommerce above, but just commerce. That’s because as we look at the future of experiences, it’s not always going to be about the traditional “e” solutions. In fact, we are hearing more and more about the headless experience. That actually is more of where Adobe is now headed when you think of AEM anyway, as a headless content management system. So to purchase a commerce solution that can power any experience from web to mobile to in-store to voice to AR and VR, it’s not going to be about just one channel. So be on the lookout for where this goes. I expect to hear more about “commerce” as the integration discussion, not eCommerce.

Taking Advantage of Sensei

AI be damned that it isn’t the biggest buzzword and probably misunderstood in the industry right now. That being said, Adobe sure has a gem on their hands with Sensei. Content, commerce, and data are the three biggest assets in building out smart AI and Machine Learning to build personalized experiences. It won’t just be about upselling/cross-selling. This is about delivering personalization at scale down to the individual. The “segment of one.” Sensei is already doing a lot in the Cloud for Adobe. Adding commerce data (products, pricing, attributes, etc) will just empower marketers and merchandisers to do more.

So…Good Buy or Best of the Rest?

Missing out on the larger, enterprise platforms like DemandWare and Hybris were stingers, for sure. However, those were big, hairy platforms and integrating enterprise to enterprise is no walk in the park. Going for something smaller, in a different market segment like mid-market might not be all that bad. There are only so many enterprise clients out there and three major experience platforms all vying for their attention. So maybe mid-market won’t be a bad move.

Adobe also has a history of purchasing solutions that have deep open source roots. Day Software, what is now AEM, was built on open source standards like JCR and OSGi. There is still a very deep developer community around AEM and having a deep community supporting Magento could be very good.

I think time will tell, but as we’ve seen with Adobe, there are very few instances where an acquisition doesn’t end up paying off for them. It will take some time to get the Magento platform integrated deeper into the Experience Cloud. It will take time to grow into enterprise clients more holistically. It will take time for the strategy to really come to fruition. In any case, Adobe needed to do something, and Magento is as good of a purchase as any other.

NOTE: A version of this was originally published on LinkedIn.

After a year of M&A where do the major DXPs go from here?