1. Significance for ActionIQ. Though ActionIQ has been a major CDP since its founding in 2014, the corporate was all the time a bit totally different from most different CDPs. Somewhat than beginning as a tag supervisor or messaging platform, ActionIQ’s roots have been in huge knowledge know-how: co-founders Tasso Argyros and Nitay Joffe have been, respectively, the founder of massive knowledge engine Aster Information (bought by Teradata in 2011) and a number one knowledge engineer at Fb. Not surprisingly, the corporate’s method to CDP was additionally pushed by knowledge know-how: specifically, it used in-memory storage to assist excessive quantity, actual time use circumstances. In recent times, the corporate advanced its know-how to supply component-based and warehouse-native choices along with a traditional built-in CDP.
The corporate’s enterprise outcomes have been much less stellar than its know-how. It primarily focused massive enterprises that would most profit from its subtle method, and had cheap success in that market. However, regardless of elevating a hefty $144 million (per Crunchbase), development stalled in recent times. Headcount, which stood at 208 in mid-2021 (per LinkedIn) has declined steadily since then and final week was 161. We don’t know whether or not gross sales additionally fell; it’s possible that the headcount reductions mirrored preemptive belt-tightening as new funding turned much less obtainable, slightly than monitoring an precise income decline.
Both approach, it doesn’t appear that ActionIQ was on a path for substantial development as an unbiased firm. So a sale to a pleasant purchaser like Uniphore makes good sense. I’m instructed that the ActionIQ product itself will proceed to be offered, supported, and developed, so it’s a very good final result for ActionIQ prospects as properly.
2. Significance for Uniphore. I’ll admit I wasn’t conversant in Uniphore earlier than this deal, regardless that they’re in actual fact a well-established, pretty massive firm (based in 2008, 800+ staff, $621 million in funding). Their specialty has been speech-related buyer expertise tech, similar to self-service, cellphone agent and gross sales help and conversational analytics. Like others in that business, they’re at present specializing in enhancing their merchandise with AI to enhance employee productiveness and enterprise outcomes.
What’s extra fascinating is the place they differ with the rivals, which is a better give attention to the information infrastructure wanted to assist AI. That is the place the ActionIQ acquisition is smart, since it’s going to assist to assist what Uniphore calls the “Zero Information AI Cloud”. Because the title suggests, Uniphore’s imaginative and prescient is to offer AI methods with knowledge with out first exporting that knowledge right into a separate database. That is the “zero copy” or “warehouse-native” method that’s more and more common in CDP circles. It’s additionally one thing that ActionIQ has advanced to assist, so the acquisition is strategically sound. As you’re in all probability conscious, Uniphore additionally introduced its acquisition of Infoworks similtaneously the ActionIQ acquisition. Infoworks is an much more technical vendor, devoted to managing cloud knowledge migrations. At 75 staff and $71 million in funding because it was based in 2014, it is smaller than ActionIQ however nonetheless a considerable enterprise. Like ActionIQ, its head depend has additionally fallen in recent times, from a current peak of 112 in early 2023.
Uniphore’s pivot to AI knowledge infrastructure looks like a very good transfer, a minimum of in contrast with the massively overcrowded AI-based CX market. I feel “pivot” is a good time period right here, since Uniphore’s earlier acquisitions – Hexagone and RedBox in 2023, Colabor in 2023, and Emotion Analysis Labs in 2021 – all companies utilized AI to extra standard CX use circumstances, similar to emotion detection and dialog evaluation. In fact, the information infrastructure house itself is the playground of main cloud firms like Google and Amazon, in addition to cloud knowledge companies like Snowflake and Databricks. Whether or not Uniphore can carve out a novel area of interest for itself as a tooling supplier to attach these methods is unsure nevertheless it appears value a attempt.
As an apart — I do not suppose a real “zero copy” method to AI knowledge is absolutely potential. We had this debate within the early years of the CDP business, when firms together with Salesforce and Adobe argued they might assemble buyer profiles on the fly and not using a persistent database. They in the end realized that did not work. This does not invalidate Uniphore’s technique, regardless that the precise implementation will virtually absolutely contain extracting, cleansing, and reorganizing knowledge and storing the outcomes someplace that AI methods can use it.
3. Significance for the CDP Trade. ActionIQ’s determination to promote to Uniphore clearly says one thing in regards to the prospects for unbiased CDP distributors, however the implications are restricted as a result of ActionIQ’s know-how was atypical. In truth, since ActionIQ already supported the “composable” and “warehouse-native” approaches which can be typically touted as successors to conventional CDP methods, you could possibly argue the deal signifies that prospects for companies taking these instructions are extra restricted than their advocates imagine.
Given ActionIQ’s distinctive state of affairs, I don’t suppose this deal presages a sudden burst of exits by mid-tier CDP distributors. Regardless that development has largely stalled for these companies, I feel most can preserve afloat lengthy sufficient to search out their footing in a brand new world. This footing might properly differ for various companies: for instance, we’ve seen Lytics try to simplify CDP deployment sufficient to make it accessible to smaller companies, whereas mParticle is shifting extra within the path of mixing buyer knowledge with analytics. All must dodge the large cloud, cloud database, advertising and marketing cloud, and messaging distributors who’re trampling the guts of conventional CDP territory. Some will certainly take shelter inside bigger organizations like Uniphore. Others might keep unbiased however retreat to niches similar to knowledge administration instruments or serving particular industries. So regardless that the marketplace for conventional, built-in CDP merchandise is more likely to shrink, I imagine a lot of the distributors will survive in some kind or one other. It’s because the elemental want driving CDPs – the necessity for unified, accessible buyer knowledge – will solely develop stronger. Corporations that discover a worthwhile option to meet that want will have the ability to thrive over time.
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