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On May 14, Acxiom announced its intention to acquire LiveRamp, a "data onboarding service," to the tune of $310 million in cash.

 

The acquisition sets Acxiom up to displace traditional MSPs. LiveRamp has built integration relationships with four of the biggest managed service providers (MSPs): Epsilon, Equifax, Experian, and Merkle. We have a hard time seeing how marketers will justify a standalone customer relationship management (CRM) database when they could, for example, port their POS and order management system (OMS) data directly into AOS, and use that as their "customer marketing platform-as-a-service."

 

What does this mean for the myriad marketers who have invested heavily in their relationship with Acxiom over the years? Can they expect those marketing databases and services to continue? And if so, then we must ask again: How can Acxiom be an agnostic technology vendor at the same time as it is supporting hundreds of marketing databases?

 

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