Cheetah Digital Debuts in Las Vegas

I spent the latter part of last week still in Las Vegas, switching to the client conference for Cheetah Digital, the newly-renamed spinoff of Experian’s Cross Channel Marketing division. Mercifully, this was at a relatively humane venue, the big advantage being I could get from my hotel room to the conference sessions without walking through the casino floor or a massive shopping mall. But it was still definitely Vegas.

The conference offered a mix of continuity and change. Nearly every client and employee I met had been with Cheetah / Experian for at least several years, so there was a definite feeling of old friends reconnecting. Less pleasantly, Cheetah’s systems have also been largely unchanged for years, something that company leaders could admit openly since they are now free to make new investments. Change was provided by the company’s new name and ownership: the main investor is now Vector Capital, whose other prominent martech investments include Sizmek, Emarsys, and Meltwater. There’s also some participation from ExactTarget co-founder Peter McCormick and Experian itself, which retained 25% ownership. The Cheetah Digital name reflects the company’s origins as CheetahMail, which Experian bought in 2004 and later renamed, although many people never stopped calling it Cheetah.

Looking ahead, newly-named Cheetah CEO Sameer Kazi, another ExactTarget veteran, said the company’s immediate priorities are to consolidate and modernize its technology. In particular, they want to move all clients from the original CheetahMail platform to Marketing Suite, which was launched in 2014. Marketing Suite is based on the Conversen, a cross-channel messaging system that Experian acquired in 2012. Kazi said about one third of the company’s revenue already comes from Marketing Suite and that the migration from the old platform will take four or five years to complete.

Longer term, Kazi said Cheetah’s goal is to become the world’s leading independent marketing technology company, distinguishing Cheetah from systems that are part of larger enterprise platforms. Part of the technical strategy to do this is to separate business logic from applications, using APIs to connect the two layers. This will make it easier for marketers to integrate external systems, taking advantage of industry innovation without requiring Cheetah to extend its own products.

Cheetah will also continue to provide services and build customer databases for its clients. Products based on third party data, such as credit information and identity management, have remained with the old Experian organization.

With $300 million in revenue and 1,600 employees, Cheetah Digital is already one of the largest martech companies. It is also one of the few that can handle enterprise-scale email. This makes it uniquely appealing to companies that are uncomfortable with the big marketing cloud vendors. The company still faces a major challenge in upgrading its technology to optimize customer treatments in real time across inbound as well as outbound channels.  It's a roll of the dice.