Acquia, the open source digital experience company, announced that it has acquired Mautic, creator of the world’s only open marketing automation and campaign management platform. Together, Acquia and Mautic form the only open alternative to expensive, closed, stagnant marketing clouds, expanding Acquia’s vision to offer the industry’s first Open Digital Experience Platform. Customers can now automate, personalize, and measure the entire customer lifecycle – across every channel, at every stage, and at every interaction.

“In today’s world, brands need to engage with their customers in a unified and intelligent way,” said Dries Buytaert, Acquia co-founder, CTO, and chairman. “The addition of Mautic helps us support brands on this mission, while also pushing us towards our vision of building the Open Digital Experience Platform. With this acquisition, we are combining open source content management with open source marketing automation. Just as Drupal disrupted web content management, we believe Mautic disrupts the marketing automation world with open source, providing our customers faster innovation, more agility, more flexibility, and better integrations.”

The addition of Mautic’s marketing automation and campaign management capabilities to Acquia’s broader Digital Experience Platform will drive seamless, one-to-one customer experiences across any digital channel, whether it’s on the web, email, SMS, push notifications, social media, or emerging channels like voice. Mautic has more than 100 martech integrations out-of-the-box and well-documented API libraries for integrations with virtually anything else. Built on two thriving and well-respected open source communities, Drupal.org and Mautic.org, Acquia’s Digital Experience Platform lays the foundation for next-generation experiences.

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“Open source is poised to transform marketing in the same way it has every other function in the enterprise. What Drupal did for the web, Elastic did for search and MongoDB did for databases, Mautic is doing for marketing automation,” said DB Hurley, Mautic founder and CTO. “With more than 250,000 users across 188 countries, Mautic has proven that marketers want the option to build and deploy digital experiences on their own terms – and we haven’t even reached the tipping point of demand. As advancements in AI, voice, and connected devices raise the bar for customer experience, there is a growing need to innovate at the edge of customer expectations – one that only open source can satisfy.”

That was the case for global brand experience agency, VMLY&R. “We chose Acquia as our partner because its open source foundation will enable us to harness the best, most creative technologies to execute our vision,” said Jeff Geheb, chief experience officer, VMLY&R. “We believe strongly in the power of open source to drive experience platforms; to create the digital experiences of the future, we needed the freedom to innovate without bounds.”

Recent market activity validates Acquia’s vision for an Open Digital Experience Platform, as 2018 delivered record open source software investments and exits. In total, marketing and experience cloud vendors invested over $8 billion to acquire open source companies, according to PitchBook — but most have yet to demonstrate a true commitment to the developer communities they’ve onboarded, or the founding principles of an open source approach. At the same time, marketing automation continues to be dominated by legacy products with deep roots in email marketing. Nearly all have been acquired and have since been buried deep inside marketing clouds where they’ve seen little innovation.

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Acquia believes in the power of an open platform and in harnessing innovations as they break — from any corner of the digital experience market, not just those built to serve a single technology provider. Mautic shares Acquia’s vision for open digital experiences, and with Acquia and Mautic, companies now have the freedom they need to own their digital destiny without the constraint of vendor lock-in.

“The future of marketing is open,” said Michael Sullivan, Acquia CEO. “Only open architectures can easily fuse disparate data and marketing technologies, creating new avenues of advancement for machine learning to automate digital experiences at scale. All this will be enabled by open source developer communities that have shown how they continually innovate ahead of the market — maximizing marketing investments instead of rendering them obsolete. Mautic builds on our vision to deliver an Open Digital Experience Platform for our customers and partners. We’ve created the only true alternative to the stale marketing clouds that restrict marketers from the freedom to innovate.”

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