Following Brevo's acquisition of CDP Octolis in December, we invited Yassine Hamou Tahra to chat with us. In recent times, a number of data marketing and CDP players have been acquired by emailing tools. So it was worth taking a step back to understand why Brevo decided to move in this direction.
In this brief exchange, Yassine shares his perspectives and thoughts on what this acquisition means for Octolis, for himself, and for the future of customer data management.
What is Octolis? Why this takeover?
Jonathan Loriaux (Badsender): Can you remind us what Octolis is?
Yassine Hamou Tahra (Brevo): Octolis is a Customer Data Platform (CDP)which is aimed at medium-sized players, especially SMEs, to help them unify their customer data from different systems and activate it across all channels.
Jonathan Loriaux (Badsender): Can you tell us a little more about the motivations behind Brevo in relation to this acquisition ofOctolis ?
Yassine Hamou Tahra (Brevo): Brevo's motivations are broadly the same as those of most CRM publishers interested in the CDP subject. CDPs, which emerged in 2015, were a logical evolution of DMPs. They were designed to reconcile online and offline data, which implies considerable data engineering work to collect and reconcile the data, and expose it in a fairly flexible model. The first CDPs were developed independently of CRMs. The reasons for CRMs to take an interest in CDPs are, on the one hand, the risk of reducing their role if companies adopt independent CDPs, and on the other, the opportunity to increase average revenue by offering an additional brick providing more intelligence and data structuring.
Jonathan Loriaux (Badsender): Does this also mean that Brevo is changing its customer target?
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Yassine Hamou Tahra (Brevo): Absolutely. The acquisition of Octolis is part of their strategy to target the mid-market, not the enterprise segment, but companies with sales of a few million to a hundred million euros. They are looking to address this segment by drawing on their historical strengths and a composable approach to CRM, while at the same time having greater solidity and depth in customer data management.
What does the future hold for the Octolis platform?
Jonathan Loriaux (Badsender): Will the Octolis solution continue to exist on a standalone basis or will it be fully integrated by Brevo?
Yassine Hamou Tahra (Brevo): The Octolis brand will be discontinued, and we will henceforth market the solution solely under the Brevo CDP name. For customers who only want the CDP solution without Brevo's Marketing CRM, this remains an option. The majority of our current customers use other solutions such as Braze or Klaviyo. Although Brevo's Marketing solution is highly relevant, there will be cases where companies use two Marketing CRM solutions. CDP enables this dual articulation, although I find it hard to imagine a customer who doesn't use any of Brevo's other bricks, as they are all very interesting.
Jonathan Loriaux (Badsender): Does this mean that your existing Octolis customers who don't use Brevo can continue to use the service?
Yassine Hamou Tahra (Brevo): Absolutely, and I'm not sure we're putting a time limit on it. We have no intention of preventing them from using other solutions such as Braze, Plie or Tartempion if they so wish.
Visit Yassine Hamou Tahra on LinkedIn and Brevo press release about the buyback.
