TMW #025 | The largest capital raise in Martech history, Atlassian’s opinion on tech regulation and how Twilio’s developers work.
Welcome to The Martech Weekly, where every week I review some of the most interesting ideas, research, and latest news. I try to look to where the industry is going and make sense of it all.
👋 A Quick Note
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How’s your week been?
I can tell you, it’s been a big one in marketing tech, with the largest capitalisation of a Martech vendor ever announced, Atlassian adding their perspective to tech regulation in Australia, a new book on Twilio’s success, and that Bernie meme, it’s been a year-in-a-week kinda week.
Ready for this? Here’s everything you’ve missed in marketing and tech this week 👇
🏡 My Work
Come work with me at The Lumery! There’s a number of strategy and marketing automation roles going. We’re growing like crazy and just got a fresh delivery of some new merch. It’s a good time to join the Australian team 🦘 Link
✍ Commentary
💸 Sitecore secures the largest capital raise in Martech history. In what’s been hailed as one of the largest capitalisations in Martech at $1.2 billion (yes billion), Sitecore is doubling down into the customer experience business in a big way. The company is known for their integrated content management solutions and ecommerce platform capabilities, and it looks like they are expanding in a number of different directions with the recently released Sitecore Experience Cloud. Sitecore has recently changed management, with a new CEO which has realigned their businesses priorities. A big part of this raise is Sitecore riding on the coattails of of the pandemic which has accelerated ecommerce adoption and the need for connected cloud solutions. The company is also quite old, it just celebrated its 20 year anniversary (which is like 200 Martech years) and found a decent market to carve out, servicing 33% of Fortune 100 businesses. Integrated CX cloud business has been on a sharp growth curve over the past 3 years, and this capital injection really just helps Sitecore regain ground lost to Salesforce and Adobe’s newer, brighter and shinier solutions. Where Sitecore goes with this massive capital injection is still to be seen. My working assumption is they will double down on customer success, instead of expanding feature sets. But we’ll see. Analysis. Press Release
Also covered this week: Atlassian's opinion on tech regulation and what makes Twilio a $60 billion dollar company. These are in the subscriber version of TMW. Sign up here to get a link to the full version.
📈Chart Of The Week
When do SaaS vendors figure out their pricing strategy? Sign up here to get a link to the full version and the chart. You won't be disappointed.
📰 Latest Developments
It’s Wikipedia’s 20th birthday!! They did a nice video of the non-profit’s founding and growth over the years. Despite all the noise about how trustworthy content on the platform is, it really is something special and a testament to our ability to create for the greater good - access to information for all. Link
Oracle releases a new low-code product. This is quite interesting, Oracle is experimenting with providing very low entry barrier products to help democratise more of the application development process. A good one for all of those citizen creators out there. Link
📚 Reading
Spotify’s re-evaluation of personalisation. Spotify published this research paper on a podcast experiment they did on their recommendation algorithms. It found that personalised podcast recommendations reduced the diversity of podcasts users listened to. Link
Can you quantify user research? A really great argument against trying to quantify qualitative research like survey results, customer interviews and user testing. Stand out quote - "Faith in data grows in relation to your to your distance from the collection of it.” Link
🔢 Data & Insights
Forrester’s evaluation of personalisation and optimisation platforms. The Q4 2020 performance of tech platforms report is focused on onsite optimisation and personalisation had some interesting surprises. Forrester included 10 vendors in their report; AB Tasty, Adobe, Dynamic Yield, Kameleoon, Kibo Commerce, Optimizely, Oracle, Salesforce, SAS, and SiteSpect. Link
Surveying the people who actually implement the tech. Sidecar has released an interesting report on how people who work in digital ecommerce teams perform, their challenges, shifts in skill sets and unique challenges for technology teams. 51% said they don’t have any time. Link
💡 Ideas
Data-as-a-service. An argument for why data-as-a-service businesses are the next big opportunity for software companies. The idea is that there’s a viable market to sell data to data science teams as more companies have been able to build capability around understanding their own data and now have the software and skills to bring in huge amounts of third party data. Link
Dominos brings together marketing and digital teams. The company is a leader in the food industry when it comes to using data and now they are taking the next stride by removing the barrier between marketing and tech skill sets. Link
Machine learning on Excel. Apparently you don’t need to learn Pytorch or Tensorflow to master AI data models. This outline makes a great argument for the power of excel to build models. Link
✨ Weird and Wonderful
The complete list of Trump’s Twitter insults. Someone at the New York Times profiled thousands of tweets, quite the undertaking. Breathtaking really. Link
A management consultant’s advice on love and sex. I have no idea why The Economist would publish something like this. It’s a novel approach to running your relationship on a spreadsheet. Link
Branding the COVID-19 vaccine? Here’s an idea - let’s incentivise vaccinations by branding the band-aids that people get after getting a shot. It’s aptly called BRAND-AID. Link
Stay Curious,
Make sense of marketing technology.
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Want to share something interesting or be featured in The Martech Weekly? Drop me a line at juan@themartechweekly.com.