Acquia acquires AgilOne, looks to improve customer experiences

Acquia has announced it will acquire AgilOne in order to unify customer data from disparate platforms and drive personal experiences across every channel.

AgilOne is a customer data platform (CDP) for enterprises. It brings new capabilities to Acquia's Open Digital Experience Platform, which utilises customer data and artificial intelligence (AI) to understand, acquire, and engage with customers.

Providing a single view of the customer, AgilOne helps marketers see value through personal experiences across every channel. According to Acquia, 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," says Acquia 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," Buytaert says.

A recent study from Acquia showed that nearly three-quarters of marketers feel that technology has made it harder to deliver personalised 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-scale brands can build customer relationships and increase customer lifetime value, the company says.

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

AgilOne founder and CEO Omer Artun says, "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.

"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.

Acquia is committed to delivering a set of capabilities designed to address the needs of marketers, the company states.

Built-in identity resolution unifies data into a single profile that serves as a single source of truth for analysis and personalisation campaigns across all points of engagement, while cleansing data and eliminating duplicate or inaccurate records.

Teams can bring their own machine learning models, choose from AgilOne pre-built models to automate segmentation efforts, or configure business-specific customisation into their pre-built models, which are then accessible across the entire platform. This creates business goal-based categories for customer segments.

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