Salesforce has signed an agreement to acquire Datorama, a marketing tech company whose platform connects and consolidates data from different sources, the companies said Monday. The deal is anticipated to close Q3.
Terms were not disclosed, though the publication CTech said the offer is for $800 million.
“With one unified view of data and insights, companies can make smarter decisions across the entire customer journey and optimize engagement at scale,” Datorama CEO and cofounder Ran Sarig said in a blog post.
Datorama was founded in 2012 and has raised $50 million in funding.
Its customers rely on it to extract data from various marketing execution platforms and put it into a single dashboard.
But going to each platform and pulling the right data is an extremely complex process, said company chief strategy officer and cofounder Katrin Ribant in a May AdExchanger Talks podcast, because different platforms have different levels of maturity.
She mentioned one prominent platform whose reporting module didn’t link to its billing module, making it difficult for users to understand their costs.
So, the Datorama acquisition is in line with Salesforce’s mission to help customers integrate their various data assets, even those that aren’t stored within its Cloud products. In fact, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has stated that the ability to facilitate integration at both the user interface level and the data level will power his company to its next financial goal: a $20 billion revenue run rate by 2022.
Certainly, Datorama isn’t the only investment that Salesforce has made to power integration. Indeed, it’s become something of a rallying cry since it bought MuleSoft in March at a $6.5 billion valuation.
“In any company, there are multiple integrations with different systems, and that’s an opportunity. The key is to tie stuff together,” Salesforce’s chief analytics officer and marketing cloud CEO, Bob Stutz, told AdExchanger in June.
On the surface, MuleSoft mirrors Datorama: Both are platforms that connect data from different systems. But MuleSoft is more of a hardcore developer platform, where techies can find or build APIs that connect to systems across the entire enterprise.
Datorama, on the other hand, is designed to help practitioners connect data from their various marketing platforms. It’s much more accessible to non-developers.
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Datorama’s clients include 3,000 brands and agencies, including PepsiCo, Ticketmaster and Unilever, said Salesforce in a blog post that announced the intent to acquire.
Both Salesforce and its competitor Oracle have been on a spree acquiring data companies. Oracle started first, by snapping up BlueKai, AddThis, Datalogix, Moat and Grapeshot, and Salesforce has gone down its own path.
While Oracle has a data marketplace and seems to be focusing on data analytics, Salesforce is dead set on managing data integration.
Salesforce declined to comment beyond the blog post.
