Skip to content
Menu
Inbox27.com
Inbox27.com

Twilio’s acquisition of Segment will support collection of digital data

Posted on October 12, 2020

In news which broke on Friday and was confirmed this morning, communication APIs vendor Twilio has entered into an agreement to acquire Segment for $3.2 billion in an all stock deal. Segment is a customer data infrastructure vendor, although it does describe itself as a CDP.

Twilio is a cloud-based provider of developer tools which allow phone and messaging channels to be embedded in apps. Uber and Lyft, for example, have both used Twilio to build communications channels within their apps. Last year, Twilio completed the acquisition of SendGrid, which provided similar technology for emails.

Segment would add the ability to capture customer data across these channels and move it through pipelines to third party systems — analytics platforms, for example, or CRMs. It does not have orchestration capabilities (indeed, Segment was the only CDP without orchestration in our Marketer’s Guide to Enterprise CDPs).

“Data silos destroy great customer experiences,” said Jeff Lawson, co-founder and CEO of Twilio in a release. “Segment lets developers and companies break down those silos and build a complete picture of their customer. Combined with Twilio’s Customer Engagement Platform, we can create more personalized, timely and impactful engagement across customer service, marketing, analytics, product and sales.”

A perspective from the market. We spoke with Tasso Argyros, founder and CEO of independent enterprise CDP ActionIQ, to get his initial reactions to the news. “Twilio’s initial business was to write code to make a call or send a text message,” he said. “With Sendgrid you could write code to send emails as well. Text is yet another customer channel, but it’s an isolated channel. Email is an isolated channel. I think that’s why the CDP has become so exciting, because you need somehow to get all this data in one place and orchestrate the information.”

The acquisition is certainly positioned as a way to create engagement with customers. The reality,” said Argyros, is that Segment has not prioritized orchestration. “Segment is really good at capturing events from a website or mobile app, and moving those events to a third-party system, including analytics systems or CDPs like us. They do collect data, but it’s mostly digital data — still very valuable and useful — but they’re not a CDP from the perspective that they wouldn’t store the history of all these events, and they wouldn’t connect to a data warehouse that had offline data.”

The customer data infrastructure positioning made a lot of sense, said Argyros. “Essentially they are pipes for digital event data: they own the edge, capturing data and passing that data over to other channels.” But given that Twilio’s main customer base is mid-market, said Argyros, much of its data will indeed come from digital sources — this makes Segment a useful complement to Twilio. “Twilio be able to do use cases like, if someone visits a website, send them a text or an email.”

If Twilio has plans to move into the enterprise market — “which is truly omnichannel” — Segment cannot help them, said Argyros. “But for medium-sized companies, where 90% of the data comes from the website, this is good enough.”

Why we care. The definition of a CDP remains controversial, but everyone wants one. On top of last year’s SendGrid acquisition, the move signals Twilio’s ambition to move beyond communications services.

 

This story first appeared on MarTech Today.

 

 

The post Twilio’s acquisition of Segment will support collection of digital data appeared first on Marketing Land.

Related Posts

  • Get beyond the algorithm with a data-driven SEO content strategy

    The divide between SEO and UX is shrinking, making success in search more challenging. Evolving…

  • Seek Surprises in Your Instagram Data

    At our 2015 conference, I talked on stage about the large shift we were seeing…

  • How to make your data sing

    It is amazing; the horrible job many digital marketers do when reporting their work to…

  • Microsoft’s Digital Marketing Center for search and social management adds features, opens beta

    The Microsoft Digital Marketing Center (DCM) is now available in open beta in the U.S.…

  • How to Pull More PPC Ad Data

    We’re losing PPC ad data. While it used to show you almost all terms, Google…

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Categories

  • Blogging
  • Business
  • Google Adense
  • Internet Marketing
  • Making Money
  • Marketing
  • Microsoft Office
  • Networks
  • SEO
  • SPAM
  • Work Email Security
  • Work From Home

Recent Posts

  • How to Make a Super Simple Blog
  • Building Links With Website Directories
  • So What’s Domain Name Parking?
  • Build More Backlinks Through Article Writing For Better SEO
  • Crate More Website Content With These Steps

Archives

  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • January 2020

Tag Cloud

block spam Blogging content creation content marketing e-mail email email goes to spam gmail email hack email hacking email hacking 2017 email hacking in tamil email hacking tamil email password crcking email phishing emails email scam email spam email tamil hacking email tracking ethical hacking g-mail hacking tricks gmail gmail hack gmail hacking gmail password hack gmail pssowrd hacking gmail spam google hack gmail hacking how to hack gmail how to hack gmail account how to hack gmail password internet marketing investing link building Marketing Pay Per Click seo Social Media spam spam email spam emails Website Traffic what is email hacking

Recommended

Bitcoin Champs

VirusDB.org

PlumComputerRepair.com

Archives

  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • January 2020

Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org
©2022 Inbox27.com | Powered by WordPress and Superb Themes!