Datorama Integrates Marketing Analytics with Salesforce
By Natalie Evans
July 20, 2018
acquisition, Analytics, CloudCraze, commerce, CRM, Datorama, Digital, Experience, marketing, marketing technologies, MuleSoft, Salesforce, Transformation
It’s been a busy year for Salesforce acquisitions, and there seems to be no stopping them. This past Monday, customer service software giant Salesforce announced that they have agreed to buy Israel-based marketing analytics company Datorama Ltd. Both companies broke the news in blog posts published to their respective websites. While the companies did not disclose the financial terms of the deal, Calcalist Tech did report that Salesforce paid over $800 million in cash for Datorama.
As Salesforce’s core sales cloud has saturated the customer-relationship management tool market, which it dominates, the San Francisco-based company has sought to drive growth in other areas, including marketing. In 2013 the company bought ExactTarget, which became the center of Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud. It’s been battling, Adobe and Oracle, ever since to become the definitive tool for marketers trying to understand how best to sell products and services in an unstable digital landscape.
Salesforce plans to use the acquisition to bolster its own data analytics capabilities within Marketing Cloud, “Today’s announcement strengthens Salesforce’s ability to empower brands worldwide to deliver smarter, more personalized and connected customer experiences. It complements recent innovations including our integration with Google Analytics 360 and Marketing Cloud Einstein capabilities,” wrote Bob Stutz, Chief Analytics Officer, and CEO, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, in a company blog post.
So, Who is Datorama?
Headquartered in New York, Dataroma was founded in 2012 by Israeli entrepreneurs CEO Ran Sarig, CTO Efi Cohen, and CSO Katrin Ribant all formerly in advertising.
Datorama has developed a platform that enables marketers to obtain information about the impact of their campaigns on their revenue. The company integrates data from all of a company's advertising on the various advertising channels with sales data in order to present the impact of advertising on sales in real time. Datorama's product will be integrated into Salesforce's campaign management and customer relations management platform. Datorama already collaborated in this respect.
Datorama developed artificial intelligence-powered marketing analytics software. “We help companies working with multiple channels of information to clean up the mess," said Cohen "If you are advertising on Facebook, on billboards, with Google, and with online banners, you are using a lot of different systems. What Datorama does is consolidate multiple sources of data and provides advertisers with a single source of analytics.”
The company employs more than 400 people at its New York office, it has a research and development center in Israel, along with offices in 16 other cities worldwide. The company previously raised $50 million across three funding rounds, from Lightspeed Management Company LLC, Marker LLC, and Innovation Endeavors.
"Salesforce’s acquisition of Datorama will enhance Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud with expanded data integration, intelligence and analytics, enabling marketers to unlock insights across Salesforce data and the myriad of technologies used in today’s marketing and consumer engagement ecosystem. With one unified view of data and insights, companies can make smarter decisions across the entire customer journey and optimize engagement at scale.”
"For Datorama customers, today’s announcement means more of what you love and have come to expect from Datorama. We will move with greater speed and support. We couldn’t be more excited about this opportunity." Sarig wrote in a company blog post.
Datorama enables more than 3,000 leading global agencies and brands-including PepsiCo, Ticketmaster, Trivago, Unilever, Pernod Ricard and Foursquare to make sense of all of their marketing data across campaigns and channels. By integrating and harmonizing this data, marketers can visualize, analyze, and take action on valuable real-time insights to optimize every marketing investment and activity.
"Datorama Data Canvas" Leverages the Power of AI
Earlier this year, Datorama also released "Datorama Data Canvas" – which is a suite of new data visualization capabilities within its Marketing Intelligence platform. Datorama Data Canvas leverages the power of artificial intelligence in a brand new way, it will help marketers create expert-designed dashboards to tell compelling, data-driven stories. Datorama’s previous AI releases have empowered marketers in similar ways to manage data integration, data harmonization and automated insights.
Interestingly enough the average enterprise relies on 91 marketing cloud services and now, more than ever, marketers are responsible for deciphering massive amounts of data from their respective technology stacks.
The ability to coordinate all the data within a single hub and customize the information for delivery for each marketer’s role is very essential. Data Canvas allows marketers, at all levels, with the ability to create visualizes in minutes with simple drag-and-drop actions, using the thousands of marketing data sources at their fingertips to tell any story or answer any question.
Salesforce's last major acquisition came in March when it spent $6.5 billion to buy MuleSoft, a data integration company. Several in the industry suggest the Datorama purchase is a complement to MuleSoft and another move aimed at ensuring data integration across many enterprise technologies. At the same time Salesforce also bought CloudCraze, supporting its commerce play. For more information my colleague Gabriella Pirrone wrote a round up article summarizing the acquisitions.
Ending Notes
Salesforce’s acquisition of Datorama is just one more in a string of hefty acquisitions the CRM giant has made to shore up its enterprise Marketing Cloud platform position. Gaining successful young players in AI whose marketing and business analytics solutions have attracted major league customers. Not only will Datorama help Salesforce compete more effectively against marketing analytics competitors, like Oracle and Adobe but it also brings significant corporate clients along for the ride. It truly doesn't look like Salesforce is slowing down any time soon!
Natalie Evans
Natalie Evans has over 16-years in the tech industry and currently works as the event coordinator and tech reporter for CMS-Connected, keeping up-to-date on what's happening in and around the Content Management industry.