Salesforce buys Evergage CDP platform to boost real-time personalization capabilities

Salesforce has acquired Evergage, a real-time personalization and customer data platform (CDP).

While Salesforce recently entered into the CDP space with the launch of its own 360 Audiences, the move to bring Evergage’s technology into the Salesforce fold likely has more to do with delivering personalized experiences than its CDP offering. The companies announced the deal on Monday.

Why we care

Evergage provides real-time, cross-channel personalization capabilities powered by machine learning. The technology helps marketers create relevant, personalized experiences and interactions throughout the entire customer journey — an offering that will likely boost Salesforce’s current Marketing Cloud applications.

“Salesforce has lacked a proper tool for real-time interactions, such as personalizing website content based on customer behaviors during a visit,” said David Raab, a principal at the marketing technology consultancy Raab Associates Inc. and founder of the CDP Institute. He believes Salesforce’s acquisition is about Salesforce closing a gap in their product line, and not a sudden acceleration of the company’s entry into the CDP space.

Raab said Evergage’s technology offers tightly integrated predictive modeling combined with real-time capabilities which is more suited to delivering personalized, real-time interactions than Salesforce’s existing generic AI capabilities provided by its Einstein platform.

As far as Salesforce’s CDP initiative, Raab says it is possible the Evergage database will eventually be replaced by direct access to Salesforce’s 360 Audience data.

“Similarly, it’s also possible that the Evergage campaign engine will eventually be replaced by a central orchestration system, but that would also require a type of real-time processing that I don’t believe is available in existing Salesforce products,” said Raab.

More on the news

• Evergage says it works with hundreds of companies with clients such as Autodesk, Carhartt, CenterState Bank, Citrix and Publishers Clearing House.
• Raab also noted Salesforce currently has a real-time, personalization solution called Interaction Manager that it is not built on Salesforce’s own technology: “We expect that Evergage technology will eventually replace that likely under the same name.”
• Financial details for the deal were not disclosed.