Salesforce Buys Evergage But Not For CDP

The CDP Institute published its semi-annual Industry Update report today, which you download here for free. Although every word and image in the report is a jewel, there’s no question that the main story in this edition is CDP industry consolidation. Events in the past six months (stretching a bit to include early January 2020) include seven new funding rounds, three acquisitions of CDP vendors, four acquisitions by CDP vendors, and four asset sales by CDP companies.  Asset sales aside, these are all ways for companies to strengthen their business more quickly than organic growth permits.

What’s particularly intriguing is the industry position of the firms in these deals.  Using our best guess at CDP employment for each vendor, only one of the twelve vendors involved funding or either side of an acquisition is among the industry’s five largest (SessionM, bought by Mastercard). The rest all ranked within the fairly narrow band from number eight to number thirty (of 101 total). That is, they were bigger than most but not the industry's largest.  I interpret this to mean that these vendors were either adding resources for a push to reach the industry top tier or have already decided they need to be part of something else.  

Notably, the firms that engaged in asset sales were much smaller: only IgnitionOne would have fallen within the top thirty and their deal might be considered more of an acquisition, since Zeta Global is apparently still selling the product.

Careful readers will have already noticed that this chart includes one other deal: acquisition of Evergage by Salesforce, announced on Monday.  Evergage fits into the size range of the other deals and the sale can certainly be seen as an escape from the crowded campaign CDP space. But the purchase is otherwise atypical because Salesforce has stressed that they are primarily interested in Everage for real time interaction management and personalization.  Of course, Salesforce is already far along in work on its own CDP, the Customer 360 Audiences component of Customer 360 Truth, which is due for general release around June. So this deal has little to do with Evergage as a CDP.  It's about closing a gap elsewhere in the Salesforce product line, not a sudden acceleration of Salesforce’s entry into the CDP space.