Why Acquia Is Buying AgilOne

By Dan Anderson • Dec 14, 2019
  • Acquia recently announced it signed a definitive agreement to acquire AgilOne, which is a leading customer data platform for enterprises

Acquia recently announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire AgilOne — which is a leading customer data platform (CDP) for enterprises to further deliver on its vision of providing open digital experiences. And AgilOne brings valuable new capabilities to Acquia’s Open Digital Experience Platform thus harnessing the power of customer data and artificial intelligence (AI) to understand, acquire, and engage with customers.

AgilOne helps marketers see immediate value through personal experiences across every channel and provides a single view of the customer.

“Marketers are demanding more flexibility and control over the tools they use for the customer experience. Unfortunately, many of these legacy tools are costly, lack real-time interactions and modern APIs, and lock data into silos where it’s inaccessible to other applications,” said Acquia’s co-founder, CTO, and chairman Dries Buytaert. “Built on open source technology, AgilOne and Acquia together will bring in data from any third-party system via open APIs, making it much easier for marketers to gain this single view of the customer and deliver better, more relevant customer experiences and analytics across every channel.”

According to a recent study from Acquia, nearly three-quarters of marketers feel that technology has made it harder to deliver personalized experiences. And the bedrock of this challenge is data. The AgilOne CDP brings customer data from online and offline technology platforms together into a single system of record so enterprise brands can build better customer relationships and increase customer lifetime value.

“Marketing teams and data professionals are under tremendous pressure to improve customer experiences through the use of data, but often fall short in delivering on that promise because data is dispersed across so many different technologies,” added Omer Artun, Ph.D., founder and CEO of AgilOne. “We’re excited to join forces with Acquia to help marketers tackle the very big challenge of wrangling their data, and applying advanced machine learning and analytics to deliver world-class digital experiences no matter how the customer engages with a brand.”

By using machine learning to unify, cleanse, and enrich customers’ data, marketers can build more effective segments and optimize the timing and targeting of campaigns across a variety of customer touchpoints (including email, SMS, website, mobile, and more). And analytics and reporting capabilities ensure that marketers can quickly measure the effectiveness of their campaigns.

Acquia is focused on delivering a set of capabilities designed to address the needs of marketers, not just Drupal developers. And powerful built-in identity resolution unifies data into a single profile that serves as a single source of truth for analysis and personalization campaigns across all points of engagement, while cleansing data and eliminating duplicate or inaccurate records.

Teams are able to bring their own machine learning models and choose from AgilOne’s pre-built models to automate segmentation efforts or configure business-specific customization into their pre-built models — which are then accessible across the entire platform. Plus this creates business goal-based categories for customer segments.

“TUMI turned to AgilOne and AI to personalize our outbound marketing, across multiple channels like email, push notifications, and one-to-one chat,” explained Charlie Cole, chief global e-commerce officer at Samsonite. “This personalization strategy has had a lasting impact on our brand’s customer experience, which previously focused on volume over quality. With AgilOne, we were able to send 40 million fewer emails in a year and make more money from our customers, increasing year-over-year e-commerce revenue six times over. I’m excited that AgilOne is now part of the Acquia family and look forward to the continued growth of the AgilOne CDP as part of Acquia’s ecosystem.”

AgilOne is going to be available to Acquia customers as both a standalone offering and a part of the Acquia Open Marketing Cloud.