This week in martech

Citrix to acquire work management solution Wrike

Citrix, the digital workspace platform, this week announced a definitive agreement to acquire Wrike, the collaborative work management solution for $2.25 billion. The aim is to integrate the Citrix digital work platform, which supplied the tools employees (and especially remote employees) need to get work done, with Wrike’s portfolio of workflow, collaboration and management tools.

The overall environment will be cloud-based and will enable structured and unstructured collaboration, team collaboration, and document-based collaborative workflows.

Why we care. The digital work management space has been on fire for months now, with Adobe spending $1.5 billion to acquire Workfront back in November, and Salesforce dropping a reported $27.7 billion dollars on Slack in December. Expect more movement and consolidation on this front.

On the move: Knotch adds execs

New hires are on their way to Knotch, the enterprise content intelligence platform headed up by CEO Anda Gansca. Ben Plummer joins the leadership team as EVP Marketing. He was previously CEO of Tier 3 Technologies, and prior to that held the CMO role at a series of SaaS ventures.

David Brown and Eli Grant also join the leadership team, Brown as SVP and Head of Strategy and Grant as VP of Accounts. On the move within Knotch is Jamie Block, promoted from Senior Director of Sales Operations to VP of Business Operations.

Sitecore secures $1.2 billion in capital investment

Sitecore, the CMS and ecommerce platform, has announced that it has secured $1.2 billion in private capital investment to support a rapid growth plan. The company described it as the largest ever capital investment in the martech space. CEO Steve Tzikakis, who joined Sitecore from SAP just five months ago described it as “unprecedented.”

Sitecore saw record revenues over the last three quarters, as businesses challenged by the pandemic sought to kick-start or refine their digital commerce strategies. McKinsey, for example, has reported that consumer and business digital adoption vaulted five years into the future in the space of eight weeks. Sitecore will celebrate its twentieth anniversary this year.

Why we care. We’ve been talking all year about how important it has been for businesses generally, and especially businesses that were not previously digital-first, to develop their digital strategies. Ecommerce has become a must-have for industrial verticals nobody would have predicted a year ago. Clearly, investors are betting heavily on players in the ecommerce space, and we think that will continue.

Vericast launches “Save”

Vericast, the marketing solution aimed at influencing consumer behavior at scale, has announced the launch of “Save,” a deals and savings aggregator delivered as direct mail of free-standing inserts. Research by Vericast business unit Valassis suggests consumers have a high propensity to retain print ads of interest for more than a week. It has also long been understood that direct mail messages, unlike online ads, can readily be seen by whole households.

Why we care. Direct mail is not going away any time soon, and just like digital marketing, it’s increasingly data-driven. But in any case, an online version of “Save” is planned for later in 2021.