Salesforce.com Buys a data management platform, Krux

Salesforce.com agreed to buy marketing data specialist Krux for a reported $700 million, as Salesforce's acquisition spree overshadows its annual Dreamforce customer conference.

With this agreement, Krux are bringing together Salesforce’s #1 CRM platform with Krux’s category-leading data management platform (DMP), the Intelligent Marketing Hub™. As a part of the Salesforce ecosystem.

Krux will also extend the Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s audience segmentation and targeting capabilities to power consumer marketing with even more precision, at scale. In addition, Krux will feed Salesforce Einstein with billions of new signals, enabling companies to be even smarter about their customers. Krux and Salesforce together will empower every company to deliver more relevant and valuable consumer experiences across every touch-point.

What's Krux?
http://www.krux.com/
Krux was founded in 2010 and specializes in data analysis and intelligence for marketing, sorting first- and third-party data sources to build a more comprehensive picture of consumers. The company had previously raised $50m in funding, and worked with brands including Spotify, Kellogg’s, Warner Brothers and Peugeot.

What's Krux Intelligent Marketing Hub?

Krux helps companies put data to work to orchestrate breakthrough brand experiences, deepen consumer engagement, and drive business results. Having evolved well beyond its DMP roots, Krux now serves as the Intelligent Marketing Hub, a data decision system that helps marketers, media companies, and agencies drive more relevant, more valuable media, content, and commerce experiences.

The Krux platform captures people data from multiple screens and sources, unifies the data to identify and understand individual preferences and expectations, and activates the data across every channel in 'right time' and 'real time'. This allows Krux to help companies create and reinforce consumer relationships through a virtuous cycle of valuable interactions and experiences.


Salesforce + Krux + ExactTarget  + AI Einstein = Marketing Cloud? What's next?
This purchase comes as Salesforce eyes a much larger prize: Twitter. The acquisition of Krux could nicely complement such a deal. Boasting current customers such as Ticketmaster and L’Oréal, Krux deploys AI to analyze audience signals in order to help advertisers develop a holistic view of individual customers. Krux should fit into the Salesforce ecosystem either way, but a possible combination with Twitter would only add to its treasure trove of consumer data and could make the Salesforce marketing cloud an even more significant player in ad-tech.