What does the Braze acquisition by Salesforce mean for the market?

Salesforce’s journey since ExactTarget

Salesforce bought ExactTarget 13 years ago for $2.5B and it has turned out to be a great investment. The product now called Engagement has been drifting towards its end of life for a while. The numbers don’t lie, Marketing & Commerce has been the weakest-performing division (1.5% growth in Q4 FY2026, and is now conveniently folded into the Agentforce number).

Salesforce has tried to address some of the technical limitations with Data Cloud (later renamed Data 360) but it is still a separate foundation from which data needs to be synchronised and duplicated. On top of this architectural challenge, Data 360 comes with a notoriously eye-watering price tag and obscure pricing. A customer reported to me 7x the predicted spend after two years of operations. Perhaps they did more than planned, perhaps it wasn’t implemented properly, etc. Whatever the reason, they didn’t see it coming and it’s the type of seven-figure problem no CMO wants on their CV.

Finally, the Marketing Cloud Next product that Salesforce has been building for a while admittedly doesn’t have functional parity with Engagement. Buying a whole product instead, especially on the scale of Braze, looks like admitting defeat.

It is reminiscent of when Adobe stopped investing in Adobe Campaign Standard (its attempt to rebuild Neolane as proper SaaS) and restarted from scratch with AJO (Adobe Journey Optimiser) which is still far from offering functional parity with Adobe Campaign Classic (previously known as Neolane) even if it does other things better. AJO also comes with the heaviness of AEP (Experience platform) and that event-driven architecture which is expensive to run and ill-aligned with high data volumes and complexity. An interesting parallel that suggests the challenge is not trivial.

Braze’s architectural sword of Damocles

On the Braze side lies the uncomfortable fact that even with the best will in the world, a SaaS solution cannot reinvent its architecture. Braze is a great front-end that has experienced substantial growth over the years, benefiting from the innovation void created by Salesforce and Adobe resting on their laurels. Yet, its power is also its greatest weakness. The event-driven, profile-centric architecture has inherent limitations by design. It made the platform simpler to configure and use, which, combined with a simple UI, attracted numerous business teams. Of course there is a price to pay for simplicity; anything slightly advanced from a data perspective had to be done ahead of being synchronised into Braze.

That data gap has become more apparent in recent years because both volume and complexity of data have increased. Adding a tool like Hightouch looked like the perfect solution but quickly the segmentation and orchestration friction could not be ignored and the unofficial alliance ended. With tools like Iterable and Klaviyo, Braze now sits in a class of solutions that come with inherent architectural limitations. It’s a challenge when the market is moving towards data-warehouse-native architectures in an effort to reduce data pipelines and their associated costs and complexity.

For Braze, it’s the epilogue to an incredible success story and maybe the realisation that they were running out of ideas on where to go next. Despite strong revenues, they were trading at $30, five years after an IPO at $65. If I were an investor I’d be quite pleased with the $47.50 buyout price, cut my losses and walk away.

What should CMOs do if they were about to buy either solution?

I was hesitating between “running for the hills” and “pray and hope the integration will be smooth”, but as appropriate as it might be, I realise it’s not helpful. I have been both on the acquired and the acquiring side in the past, so I’m fairly confident when I say that both companies will try to reassure and claim that nothing changes for the time being. It’s usually true. An integration plan of this magnitude is extremely complex and will require a lot of time and energy. While it’s somewhat reassuring, it’s also frightening to see how an acquisition of this type is like slamming on the brakes of innovation and goodwill. I am saying this from first-hand experience, referring to a product that I am still deeply fond of, and was sad to see die a slow death.

Don’t get me wrong, those things don’t happen from bad intentions. The “simple API integration” is never that simple, the multiple codebases are not just different languages but a different ethos, the dev teams clash, the good people give up, the rest fight for control or leave with a golden parachute. Just look at what happened to Unica, Silverpop or EmailVision. The martech graveyard is full of once-strong solutions that have been acquired, renamed, sold off for scraps, or retired into a PE fund for a few more years of revenue extraction. For now, expect two businesses that were fiercely competing with one another last week to have everything now surprisingly making sense in a new markitecture where Data 360 is as useful a foundation to Braze as it’s supposed to be for ExactTarget/Engagement, Pardot or Next…

In practice, if you’re signing a two-year term, be ready for a re-evaluation at the end and pay particular attention to change-of-control and termination clauses, price protection on renewal, written roadmap commitments, and as always push for a proof of concept. If you’re planning for the longer term, it might be worth looking again at what type of business you want to partner with, and what architecture they are built upon. I’m not biased enough to believe imagino is right for everyone, but I am deeply convinced that the architecture it provides needs to be positioned against what Adobe/Salesforce/Braze have to offer. If your review process has not looked into this, it should, urgently.

What it means for the market

Let’s remember this might just be a market share move; it financially makes sense for Salesforce to buy the company where a lot of their clients were going. That being said, I don’t believe it can resolve the underlying issue with the architecture of either stack. Mary Shelley would be impressed by a Frankenstack made of Pardot, Krux, Datorama, Informatica, ExactTarget, Evergage and Braze just to name a few. And I’ll refrain from scratching at the AI paint job that brings all of this to life. Ultimately, there is also a certain lack of love for products that are sold to the C-suite and which business teams are left struggling with. Marketing teams will take stock, and many agencies will be disappointed to see a valid option being gobbled up by a company like Salesforce.

The good that will come from this is the forced re-evaluation of the market. If data ownership is important and you’ve built a foundation on BigQuery, Microsoft Fabric or Snowflake, avoiding Adobe or Salesforce’s data clouds now leaves few enterprise options on the table, imagino being one.

Mathieu Lavedrine has spent his career at the intersection of martech and data. 8 years at Neolane/Adobe, Tinyclues (a pre-LLM AI company), and now running partnerships and competitive strategy at imagino, a data-warehouse-native Customer Experience Platform.

What does the Braze acquisition by Salesforce mean for the market? was originally published in Snowflake Builders Blog: Data Engineers, App Developers, AI, & Data Science on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.