• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, July 16, 2018

Software marketing company Salesforce signed an agreement to acquire Cloud-based AI marketing platform Datorama for a reported $800 million, but silence from the two companies, other than their respective blog posts, leaves many unanswered questions.

Will Datorama will remain a separate company? Will cofounder Ran Sarig remain CEO? Insiders wonder if Salesforce will keep the brand name or integrate the technology into its own corporate culture.

A Salesforce spokesperson confirmed that “Salesforce has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Datorama,” but provided no future details.

One thing is certain: The deep pockets of a new parent company will help the Datorama “move with greater speed and support,” Sarig wrote in a blog post.

Salesforce’s acquisition of Datorama will enable brands like PepsiCo, Ticketmaster, Trivago, Unilever, Pernod Ricard and Foursquare to make better sense of their marketing data and expand across platforms to gain new insights about their customers.

Although unconfirmed, Salesforce likely saw the potential in Datorama’s focus on artificial intelligence (AI) and its software integration into Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa. The move allows marketers to gain data based on marketing analytics for campaigns to answer questions such as: “What’s my top performing campaign by clicks in the last week?”

In 2017, Jay Wilder, director of product marketing at Datorama, in 2017 told Search Marketing Daily that the integration with Alexa would provide computations on more complex questions, such as the best way to decrease CPMs in a specific channel or to find out what is influencing them. 

In June, Datorama launched Data Canvas, a suite of data visualization capabilities within its Marketing Intelligence platform. It relies on artificial intelligence (AI) to help marketers create dashboards that tell stories based on data.

Prior to release, the product was tested by marketers at companies like Ticketmaster, iProspect, Spark Foundry and Huge.