Bloomreach Is Proud to Welcome Hippo to the Bloomreach Family!

What is Hippo?

Hippo is a global digital experience platform company that is redefining the CMS landscape for the new cross-channel, multi-touchpoint world. At a time when businesses are hungry to understand their online visitors – whether known or unknown – Hippo’s open and agile platform is engineered to determine and deliver the most relevant content at the right time and place, making content experiences more personalized for every single visitor.

With offices also in Boston, London and Germany, Hippo has more than 150 customers located in 13 countries serving multiple verticals including retail, manufacturing, financial services, tech, education plus media and entertainment. Many of the world’s premier brands and most prestigious organizations trust Hippo with their voluminous digital content experiences including REI, University of Maryland, United Kingdom’s National Health Service and one of the most-valuable sports teams on the planet, FC Bayern Munich.

Why did Bloomreach make this acquisition?

Over the past seven years, Bloomreach has grown its reputation as having the most sophisticated digital experience and personalization platform for commerce. Powered by machine-learning and natural-language processing algorithms, Bloomreach drives superior commerce experiences for many of the top global retailers and currently sees data from more than 20 percent of all U.S. commerce.

However, it has always been our goal to reach beyond retail to create relevant and personalized content experiences for all enterprises. Presenting the right content at the right time through the right touchpoint to drive specific outcomes has been the holy grail of content-experience optimization, but the many different technology point solutions have fallen short. No one has truly merged predictive technology with content performance into a single digital experience platform, governed by internal and external data and powered by self-learning intelligence.

Creating superior digital experiences that drive people to desired outcomes – whether it’s to purchase a product or find a solution to their problem – requires enterprises to have more contextual knowledge with faster and richer understanding of what their customers want. It requires an understanding of visitor intent that maps to each person’s journey, because everything else is just noise.

In order to accelerate our vision, we realized that partnering with a proven web content management and delivery platform was the best way achieve our goal. However, not just any partner would match Bloomreach in technology and agility. Then we met Hippo, a company already turning the CMS industry on its head. With Bloomreach’s strong financial performance, stable revenue growth and sound unit economics, we were in a position to cement the Hippo partnership with a full acquisition.

Why Hippo?

Hippo brings superior cross-channel, context-aware delivery and portal capabilities. Hippo’s open delivery tier allows easier integration with complementary digital experience technologies, including commerce, campaign management, marketing automation, self-service and loyalty platforms technologies.

With the acquisition of Hippo, Bloomreach will be in a position to provide enterprises the first platform layer that natively leverages data and algorithmic intelligence to author, build, personalize, market and measure all digital experiences. Bloomreach brings its core expertise in understanding visitor intent; and Hippo, recently named a Visionary in the Gartner Web Content Management Magic Quadrant, brings its open, agile and smart content management system. Together, these companies will bring data-driven content insights to enterprises and relevant digital experiences to their customers in a cross-channel world.

What is a digital experience platform, and why does the market need it?

A digital experience platform creates, manages, personalizes, delivers, measures and optimizes cross-channel customer experiences for a multi-touch, multi-device, multi-channel world. And while many technology vendors have promised this ability, we believe that large enterprises have employed one class of technology to build their websites, and then leveraged another to optimize it.

This makes no sense. If the experience, optimization and delivery applications were working so well, then why would a business need additional personalization software to test and target on top? In today’s ultra-competitive landscape, the optimization, personalization, digital commerce and content management markets are converging. According to Forrester Research, customer analytics and web content management are the top two investment priorities for digital experience technology leaders¹; and Gartner predicts that by 2018, organizations that have fully invested in all types of personalization will outsell those that have not by 30 percent.

Bloomreach – with the Hippo acquisition – will provide the industry’s first digital experience platform that uses data not only from within a business’s walls, but also leverages data and insights from the entire Web. It gets smarter while you sleep, autonomously optimizes at scale and it will provide industry-leading applications for people to complement the machine, creating even greater experiences.

¹ Forrester Research, Digital Experience Technology And Delivery Priorities, May 17, 2016

What does this mean for current Bloomreach customers? Will any Bloomreach product capabilities or services be affected in the near term?

First and foremost, Bloomreach is 100 percent committed to its customers; so rest assured, all current services and operations will experience no disruptions. Everyone on the Bloomreach team realizes that every page, every widget, every second counts – especially with the holiday shopping season approaching. We will continue to service, we will continue to innovate and we will continue to be your secret weapon in an increasingly competitive commerce landscape.

Secondly, we see a great opportunity to introduce Hippo to our current customers. Hippo is a world-class web content management and digital experience platform that has a proven record working with major ecommerce companies, and its open architecture means it easily integrates with other technologies. As the two companies continue to integrate over the next year, we absolutely see even greater use cases for the Bloomreach + Hippo digital experience platform to power more functions of both companies’ customers.

What does this mean for Bloomreach’s partners?

Bloomreach is committed to all of its current partner agreements, in addition to honoring all agreements with Hippo’s partners. In the short term, as both companies continue to expand their footprint within their respective verticals, there may be an opportunity to connect with partners on immediate business opportunities. As the two companies get further along with the integration, there may be scenarios where expanded relationships are mutually beneficial.

What will happen to the brands?

Both companies have built tremendous reputations as innovation leaders with superior technology in digital commerce and content, and both companies will maintain their trajectory in the early stages of the integration. However, as the integration of both the teams and technology progresses, the Hippo brand will fold under the Bloomreach brand.

What does this mean for current employees and those interested in joining Bloomreach and Hippo?

This is an exciting time to be a part of Bloomreach and Hippo! Current employees will continue to execute on their current duties, as both companies will continue investing in technology, engineering, customer support, marketing and sales activities. As the two companies integrate their teams over time, there will be new and interesting challenges for those passionate to be a part of the digital experience revolution. We encourage anyone interested in this journey to follow job opportunities on our career pages and social channels.