Krux CEO Tom Chavez has hinted at how the data management platform (DMP) looks set to be a major part – or in fact a vital organ, of the the Salesforce marketing cloud.
While little detail has emerged following news of Salesforce’s intent to acquire the firm, speaking at the recent Dreamforce event in the US, Chavez said “Krux is the intelligent marketing hub” and urged people to “think of us as the brain of the marketing cloud”.
Krux, which works with marketers and publishers such as L'Oréal, Uber, Spotify, New York Times and News Corp, has been Salesforce's preferred DMP for 18 months.
“Just just like brains, we take billions of signals from lots of different sources and touch-points. We organise, unify and try and make sense of all that data using artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, Chavez explained.
“Also like brains, we send instructions to what I like to think of as the fingers, knees and toes – all of the execution systems that sit at those end points where there’s a consumer on the other side - whether it’s web, social, mobile, video, refrigerators, cars – whatever it is, there’s a consumer on the other side looking for a perfect experience in the right content at the right time.”
Chavez went onto explain how Krux has more than five billion offline records flying in a month, its platform interacts with more than 3.5 billion devices and browsers and it sends more than 200 billion instructions per month to the various execution systems.
Sharing the big brands
He also added that it’s “not a standing start for Salesforce and Krux”, given the duo have shared customers such as Warner Bros, Ticketmaster, Live Nation, Uber and Canadian apparel brand Kit and Ace.
Speaking to AdNews afterwards, Salesforce’s SVP product marketing Eric Stahl, said in Chavez’s metaphor, activating all the fingers and toes refers to Salesforce’s different parts that wait for the right data signals - the marketing cloud, its Journey Builder tool - which lets marketers build multichannel campaigns that guide customers through every step of their journey - and all the different channels it supports.
He said every time Salesforce does a keynote or when he is at a customer event clients are often in the midst of a DMP evaluation and they ask Salesforce for their point of view.
“The next question out of out most peoples’ mouths would then be, ‘when are you going to buy a DMP?’, so there’s just been a huge pull in that direction so this is a natural extension of our product line,” Stahl said.
“The reaction so far has been fantastic and we have a lot of customers wanting introductions to Tom and his team and I think they are going to get a lot of inbound interest this week.”
Road map pending
He said nothing more could be added as it was still very early days, but as the deal closes a more detailed integration product road map of the products and organisations and how all that will work will emerge.
Salesforce has been on a mergers and acquisition spree in the past 12 months spending an estimated US $5-6 billion dollars on a total of 10 companies. It’s also been the subject of a Twitter takeover deal, but rumours that it may buy the social media giant sparked fear in its shareholders which caused Salesforce stocks to drop.
Ahead of the news in June that Microsoft would acquire LinkedIn, it was also rumoured that Salesforce had its hat in the ring for that buy out.
In July it spent $2.8 billion to acquire Demandware, a cloud-based e-commerce company that enables retailers and brands to ‘break free of the shackles of traditional, legacy platforms’.
In Australia, Krux is headed up by Jo Gaines. Check out her profile here.
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