Recently SAP surprised us a little bit by acquiring EMarsys, one of the leading personalization and engagement platforms out there. Ultimately, I think SAP is trying to stay ahead of Adobe and Salesforce in the customer experience realm.

Strategically, I have a few questions and thoughts about what this means.

SAP decided that Hybris had a big gap (it does) and wanted to fill it. This could prompt other platforms to take ESPs and/or personalization solutions off the table. What would happen if Adobe or Salesforce were to scoop up companies like Yotpo and Klaviyo and Nosto? (Dynamic Yield and Monetate are already off the table) - some of these apps are installed by something like 50%+ or more of Shopify Plus installations.

Probably some pretty big disruption to that "good enough" Shopify ecosystem.

SAP decided that the platform is being commoditized and the real game is in the apps. Is it likely that some of the customers on EMarsys (like Gymshark) are going to switch to Hybris anytime soon? Likely not. But that doesn't mean that SAP can't continue to be a big player in retail applications.

In a way, it's a shame that Microsoft couldn't think this way as well.

Heads up from my friend Victor Castro.

Alison Raphael shared some thoughts: “There is an over-abundance of marketing personalization/ESP platforms today. Having recently helped a client shop for the best solution from their mid-size business, the number of platforms that have launched in the past 5 years or so must be nearing 100+. Consolidation would not be surprising. Some others I would add to your list: Braze, Iterable and Customer.IO. BTW, many of these platforms are reliant on a back-end solution like SendGrid (Twilio) for "last mile" delivery, so partnering with a large infrastructure player might make sense.” The bolding here was my emphasis, but man, this is a product marketer’s worst nightmare.

Naz Caliskan added: “Yes, this acquisition by SAP was completely out of the blue. Also if you consider that Exact Target was acquired by Salesforce (now Salesforce Marketing Cloud) and Marketo acquired by Adobe (represents one of the Ms from the M&M acquisition) were acquired circa 7+ years ago. It’s either SAP trying to catch up and realising how far they are from the mid market, or it’s an attempt to move SAP into that space. Either way, it’ll be interesting what this means for Emarsys renewals.” In a reminder at how tough it is to do acquisitions, both Marketo and Exact Target look bad these days. Heck, they didn't look super-great originally!