Optimizely acquired Zaius, a customer data platform, in March 2021 and rebranded it as the Optimizely Data Platform (ODP). The CDP replaced Optimizely’s homegrown Visitor Intelligence and brought it to feature parity with rivals like Adobe, Salesforce, Sitecore, and Acquia, all of which had recently acquired their own customer data platforms.
Optimizely, formerly Episerver, continued its run of acquisitions with Zaius. Zaius, founded in 2012, had raised $50.8 million by 2018. Its Series B was led in part by Insight Partners, the venture firm also behind Optimizely.
In a nutshell, CDPs are concerned with these primary tasks: data collection, data unification, data activation, and data insights.
Salesforce
The Zaius acquisition pushed Optimizely up the DXP field. By April 2021 it was being woven into the product line as ODP, which closed the gap with Adobe’s real-time customer data platform and Acquia’s AgileOne CDP, acquired in December 2019.
Investors clearly see a need to connect the growing number of digital touchpoints. Data gets captured in volume but ends up siloed across platforms, and the CDP is a newer category built to fix that. In 2018, Zaius was marketed as a kind of CRM. The category connects data from web, mobile, social, and commerce into one platform so marketers can target audiences with the help of machine learning.
CDPs are really just an evolution of CRM, finely tuned for the high-scale, real-time requirements of the digital-first modern B2C marketer. CDPs share CRM’s goals of managing customer data to drive relevant and productive experiences.
Salesforce
Salesforce has its own CDP in Customer 360 Audiences. Salesforce may not come to mind as a DXP, but with its 2016 acquisition of Demandware, now Commerce Cloud, even the CRM players are investing in commerce and customer data. Data is currency, and many are spending to control it.
Adobe Experience Platform
Sitecore’s Boxever CDP
Sitecore also acquired a CDP, Boxever, in March 2021 after a billion-dollar funding round that January. Investment across the DXP space was moving fast, and the acquisitions came in quick succession.
As a digital strategy consultant in the commerce space, watching these startups get absorbed by venture-backed, high-growth platforms was a useful signal of where the market was heading. For more on how these platforms stack up, see Optimizely B2B commerce in the Forrester Wave and Optimizely vs WordPress for enterprise.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Optimizely Data Platform (ODP)?
ODP is Optimizely’s customer data platform, built from its 2021 acquisition of Zaius. It collects, unifies, and activates customer data across channels, replacing Optimizely’s earlier Visitor Intelligence feature.
When did Optimizely acquire Zaius?
Optimizely acquired Zaius in March 2021 and rebranded it as the Optimizely Data Platform by April 2021.
