Monetate Acquired! What This Means for the Unified Cloud Commerce Industry?

By Sudipto Ghosh On Oct 10, 2019

Monetate Acquired! What This Means For The Unified Cloud Commerce Industry?

Unified Commerce Cloud is a unique ecosystem. It keeps adding more and more Martech and AIOps players every year, mostly through CDPs, Mobile CRMs and BI tools. Funding is good, and so are sales and partnerships. When Splunk bought SignalFx for $1.05 billion, we knew that the digital businesses would take inspiration from the development. Today, Monetate is snapped by Kibo Commerce. Monetate is a leading testing and optimization provider. The deal would allow Monetate to join Kibo and Certona crews and empower retailers to personalize and optimize the entire customer journey.

Personalization Economy: Converging AI, IT, and Unified Cloud Commerce

Personalization drives customer engagement. In 2016, Forrester had reported that customers (B2B or B2C) no longer purchase products — they purchase experiences. For a fast-moving industry such as retail, customer engagement means quick sales and growth. Empowered customers, through their VOC and influencing powers can directly boost sales and impact affinity, loyalty and share-of-wallet metrics. However, the future of retail is still undecided — yet, it is the most exciting industry for Marketing and DevOps teams. With Big Data analytics, AI and 5G all coming together to diversify retail and omnichannel experiences, we have a new combined identity to disrupt the ecosystem.

Kibo’s unified commerce cloud is in direct competition to Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Oracle NetSuite, SAP Commerce (ex-SAP Hybris), FastSpring, Magento (now Adobe), and Shopify.

How does AI, Personalization and Agile Cloud in an Unified Cloud Commerce Influence Retail Tech

Kibo, a leader in cloud commerce, will leverage Monetate to expand personalization capabilities. This will not only complement its best-in-class Certona solution but will also extend the reach of Kibo’s end-to-end cloud commerce platform using AI specialization in Monetate’s offerings. The combined solution set will deliver an unparalleled, best-in-class unified cloud commerce platform that will provide consumers with a robust, personalized omnichannel commerce experience.

Monetate provides Personalization software for consumer-facing brands, enables marketers to grow more of their customers into their best customers.

It is the provider of industry-first Personalization Exchange. Leading brands use the exchange to create a more relevant and personalized customer experience.

Powered by AI, the Monetate Personalization Engine enables brands to connect all of their data sources to make the most intelligent decisions possible regarding their interactions with each customer.

At the time of this announcement, Stephen Collins, CEO of Monetate, said —

“Monetate continues to be committed to providing our clients with capabilities to deliver the best experiences for their customers in every interaction over time. Our clients have leveraged our solution to deploy successful personalization strategies to drive growth and conversion. The opportunity to become part of a larger commerce platform with complementary products is exciting for both our clients and employees.”

AIOps and Retail Tech: A Unique Collaboration

Our AiThority.com analysts hunted down top AIOps companies in the last quarter. Moogsoft is one such AIOps software provider, and so is StackState. They could transform the Retail Tech industry with their operational excellence. According to Deloitte, their collaboration with Moogsoft allows them to “use big data, modern machine learning and other advanced analytics technologies to directly and indirectly enhance IT operations (monitoring, automation and service desk) with proactive, personal and dynamic insight. AIOps can be applied to automate many use cases within IT DevOps.”

So, generally speaking, AIOps platforms allow unified commerce cloud to provide customers with unique solution for their challenges related with supporting and maintaining high-availability and reliable services based on complex and dynamically adjustable IT infrastructure.

Finding Customer Everywhere: Will an Intuitive, Self-Serving Unified Cloud Commerce Suite Retail and E-Commerce Take Off!

Oracle NetSuite observed that in retail, “Service and Commerce don’t live at set places in a sales cycle – they’re intertwined throughout the customer journey. Retailers who spend extra dollars and creativity on their website personalization are are more likely to dominate over competitors who are behind in doing so.

As the market becomes more dynamic, the future of commerce is centered around the customer, and the key to creating a competitive advantage relies on personalization. The most successful retailers and brands understand their customers and realize they must go beyond disjointed point solutions and fully commit to a holistic, personalized customer journey. The addition of Monetate to Kibo’s commerce cloud offerings means its retailers and brands will be better equipped to curate, test, and optimize customer experiences intelligently and consistently wherever they occur — online, in-store, through mobile apps, via AI assistants, and more.

The addition of Monetate will enable Kibo to offer A/B & multivariate testing, content personalization, and audience building & targeting with an intuitive, self-serve user interface designed for merchandisers and marketers. Certona is the #1 Personalization Provider and Monetate is the #2 Personalization Provider according to the Internet Retailer Top 1000. Both Certona and Monetate were named Leaders in the 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Personalization Engines, anchoring on their respective strengths of recommendations and testing. Clients of Monetate will continue to enjoy the exceptional service and support that they have come to expect while also having access to Kibo’s Order Management, e-commerce, and Certona personalization recommendations and search solutions.

David Post, CEO of Kibo, said —

“Providing a personalized customer journey is vital to brands and retailers in today’s competitive marketplace. Consequently, we’re going to heavily invest in personalization as part of our commerce cloud to outpace our competitors in providing both innovation and a holistic suite of solutions. With Monetate, we recognized the opportunity to acquire a market leader in discovery, segmentation, testing, measurement, and optimization. Through the combination of Certona and Monetate, we’ve created the leading personalization engine in the market, which will enable retailers to make the most of customer intent-driven data, deliver exceptional content experiences, and measure incrementality to optimize customer lifetime value at scale.”

Currently, more than 600 B2B and consumer retailers and brands rely on Kibo to deliver personalized and connected shopping experiences across retail touchpoints. Kibo’s cloud commerce platform powers unified commerce and omnichannel fulfillment strategies and is built on an API-first, microservices architecture. The Kibo platform scales as clients grow their business, while maintaining a low cost of ownership and faster time to market than other commerce solutions.

Kibo’s software and services include eCommerce, Order Management, Personalization, and Mobile Point-of-Service for retailers, manufacturers, and brands.

So, who will be among our top 10 Unified Commerce Clouds in the upcoming MarTech RADAR 2020? Watch out for the space — it would not be easy.