Salesforce and Braze: What should I do now?
I’ve been watching Salesforce’s frantic acquisition strategy with a certain amount of incredulity lately.
This week, it was Braze, the marketing platform.
LinkedIn, Substack and Reddit have, of course, been full of posts and opinions. Some more interesting than others.
If you are a Salesforce or Braze customer, you probably have 2 very practical questions:
- Should I do something now?
- And what should I watch over the next 6 to 12 months?
That is what I want to focus on here.
First, the “why”.
Why is a company buying another company in the first place
Companies generally acquire businesses to gain new capabilities or a technology, reach new customers, or strengthen their competitive position. Sometimes, of course, they manage to do all 3.
Oracle’s acquisitions of Siebel and PeopleSoft, some 20 years ago, gives us a good case.
With Braze, my guess is that it serves 2 purposes: Strengthening Salesforce’s AI proposition and closing a gap with some specialist marketing platforms.
That may make sense for Salesforce. What it means for customers is another matter.
Which brings us to the more immediate question.
What should customers do now?
It is still early days. The deal has yet to close, and the roadmap is still to be worked out.
Get Didier Dessens’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
For now, I would not start moving things around just yet. An acquisition announcement is not, in itself, a reason to change a roadmap. There is quite a lot of unknown.
Instead I would probably ask myself: Could this actually save me any money?
I would compare licences and other costs for instance.
For an organization already using Braze, this means understanding the continuity of the roadmap, the commercial terms and the integration options.
For Marketing Cloud customers, it is whether Braze fills in a gap, or simply gives us just a new way to solve a problem we have already fixed?
What I would watch over the next 6 to 12 months?
- How well will the products work together?
Does Salesforce release a target architecture showing how Braze, Marketing Cloud, Data360 and Agentforce will work together? Something we can actually use to make a decision.
2. Where is the commercial value?
Will it improve our marketing performance or customer retention enough to justify its associated costs?
3. What role will Agentforce play?
Especially whether it can use these capabilities to have better results. There is a difference between doing more things and achieving more.
I would also listen to what customers and partners have to say, particularly about migration, coexistence and what works in practice.
Especially how current Braze customers react to becoming a part of Salesforce.
Do they see new possibilities, or start wondering what it might mean for pricing, product independence and complexity?
I remember Oracle’s acquisitions. Buying new capabilities is one thing. Making the combination worthwhile for customers is another.
That is the part I would watch.
