Crazy Acquisition Week/Month!

I had no Idea our recent acquisition of Intersect would start a partner shopping spree!   What a week.....Salesforce buys ExactTarget and then SAP snaps up hybris...... These deals are positive developments and mean MORE opportunity for Crown!  What a week in Chicago!  All this activity will fuel our drive to 1,000 colleagues!  (btw, IBM acquired Softlayer also...)

Before I go into the deals of the week...

Mark Bartlett and the Crown team rocked the Internet Retailers show with our Experience Driven Commerce reel - I sent you all the picture yesterday.  Crown was THE centerpiece and buzz at the Adobe (and hybris) booths and we were not even scheduled to be in the Adobe booth!  Adobe was so excited about Crown's message and offering that they asked us to attend all their upcoming shows!  This increased activity with Adobe will drive business to our content, customer experience and commerce practices.  

We showed this demo on Adobe's main screen and they had Crown talk to all of their potential customers that were commerce related.  We are also in their Pimp My Page (PMP) process where their prospective clients have Crown pimp out a page inside Adobe (also getting us in the pipeline for Experience Driven Commerce deals).

The deals...

The Salesforce acquisition of Exact Target will expand the prospects of our Digital Messaging practice.  Salesforce will have a big impact on ET with their existing customer base along with the future sales prospects.  Salesforce paid a premium for ExactTarget because of the growth potential.  We have a solid team who can deliver great customer projects on the ET platform so we are well positioned to capture some of the growth.  Our ExactTarget connectors with hybris, SeeWhy/hybris and Adobe/ET/hybris will play an important role with Salesforce and SAP.

The SAP and hybris deal was the second blockbuster announcement during the show.  Overall from a Crown perspective, this move will drive the already hot demand for hybris to new levels and will in turn drive up demand for our services very quickly.  SAP plans to unleash their salesforce on this new opportunity.  The compelling part of this acquisition is they were strong partners prior to this move and they have 150 customers up an running with fully integrated platforms - so they did not buy it and now it will take 2 years to complete the integration - they have the integration ready and working at 150 different customers.  With our experience and the capabilities you all bring to the table Crown is the right partner at the right time with the right mix of services and capabilities to provide the services all the sales activity will generate.

A great way to differentiate from Deliotte and Accenure (who will use their SAP experience to muscle into some deals) is to leverage the Customer Experience Crown now brings to the table (See the Adobe booth paragraph above).  Accenture and Deloitte can't do this.  Fluid saw it and said "we can't do this".  AND, CMOs don't give a crap about SAP.  They care about Customer Experience.

I could not be more excited about the market opportunity these deals drive and our positioning to take advantage of the opportunity.  I am sure it will be a topic at our upcoming RED reset session with Keith.

One of our core beliefs is that speed wins - Lets plan big, start small and move fast to capture the opportunity at our feet.