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Acquia Acquires Widen, Salesforce Updates Service Cloud and More CX News

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Acquia acquired Widen, a digital asset management (DAM) provider, to lead this week's customer experience and digital marketing software news.

Acquia, a Boston-based digital experience management software company, has announced that it has agreed to acquire Widen, a cloud-native digital asset management (DAM) and product information management (PIM) software provider.

The move represents the latest acquisition for a digital experience management software provider, following moves from Bloomreach, Sitecore and Optimizely earlier this year. Those three each acquired customer data platforms (CDPs), something Acquia did in late 2019 with its acquisition of AgilOne.

Acquia, backed by the open-source web content management system Drupal, and its creator, Dries Buytaert, will now have access to Widen's digital asset management system that stores media, product information and marketing copy in a single workflow. It will integrate with the Acquia Open Digital Experience Platform (DXP). Acquia long had a native DAM gap, relying on third-party integrations. It debuted Acquia DAM in 2017 to address the gap and called it Acquia Digital Asset Manager; its older DAM web page now includes a link to the Widen acquisition, which makes this more like an upgraded DAM offering than a first-time native capability for Acquia.

Widen will be available as part of Acquia Open DXP or as a standalone offering. The transaction is expected to close later this month.

In other customer experience and digital marketing software news...

InMoment Acquires Lexalytics

InMoment, a provider of experience improvement solutions, has announced it has completed the acquisition of Lexalytics, a provider of cloud and on-premise natural language processing (NLP, and machine learning data management). Lexalytics provides structured and unstructured data experience through its text analytics solutions on social, call center, voice, reviews, support tickets, chat logs and additional data channels. It includes native text analytics across 24 languages.

Salesforce Releases Automation, AI Updates for Service Cloud

Salesforce announced new AI-powered workflows and contact center innovations in Service Cloud. New workflows built into the Customer 360 platform are designed to enable customer service teams to predict, route, and solve customer needs. The updates also include new digital contact center innovations for video, chat, voice and workforce engagement.

Learning Opportunities

Salesforce is continuing to push its "Slack-First" approach, integrating the capabilities from its $27.7 billion acquisition of the chat and collaboration app. With Slack-First Service, it envisions teams from devops to finance in a new Slack channel collaborating on an incident in real-time. It also is promoting Einstein Conversation Mining, which analyzes calls to understand topics and categorizes calls by incident.

ON24 Brings Together Live Webinar Viewing, On-Demand Content

ON24, a digital marketing and webinar software provider, has introduced new capabilities for audiences to watch ON24 Webcast Elite live webinars directly in ON24 Engagement Hub. ON24 Webcast Elite delivers live, simulive and on-demand interactive webinars. With live webinar viewing now available in ON24 Engagement Hub, companies can bring together all their live and on-demand experiences.

Companies can capture first-person engagement data when customers and prospects view a live webinar in ON24 Engagement Hub, as well as measure program and content performance. ON24’s AI-based recommendation engine delivers additional content and personalized experiences based on an individual’s needs and interests.

InsideView Adds Integrated Technographic Profiles

InsideView, a Demandbase company, has announced that it is integrating technographic data from fellow Demandbase company, DemandMatrix, into its platform. The integration expands InsideView’s technographic data offering with data and intelligence providing sellers with another buyer signal when targeting customers. In addition, InsideView will offer customized technographic intelligence based on new data sets tailored to the needs of enterprise sales, marketing, analytics and data science teams through professional services.

InsideView’s enhanced technographic data provides information about the technology stack of a potential customer, including the hardware and software installed at the company both in front of and behind the firewall, technology adoption patterns and data predicting the next technology a company will purchase.

IBM Watson Launches New AI and Automation Features

IBM has announced the launch of new AI and automation capabilities in IBM Watson Assistant for customer service experiences. This includes a new collaboration with IntelePeer, a Communications Platform-as-a-Service provider. This is designed to help set up and test a voice agent, and a new agent app designed to enable a hand-off to a live agent while maintaining the conversation's context.

Using new natural language processing capabilities from IBM Research, Watson Assistant Search Skill is designed to help customers resolve issues on first contact. IBM is adding new features in Watson Assistant, the company's intelligent virtual agent, to help businesses leverage AI and NLP to address customer issues on first contact.

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About the Author

Dom Nicastro

Dom Nicastro is managing editor of CMSWire and an award-winning journalist with a passion for technology, customer experience and marketing. With more than 20 years of experience, he has written for various publications, like the Gloucester Daily Times and Boston Magazine. He has a proven track record of delivering high-quality, informative, and engaging content to his readers. Dom works tirelessly to stay up-to-date with the latest trends in the industry to provide readers with accurate, trustworthy information to help them make informed decisions. Connect with Dom Nicastro: