How enterprise marketing teams are moving from Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Braze

Enterprise marketing teams have been moving from Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Braze for years. Salesforce’s agreement to acquire Braze just made that path the obvious one. Below is why teams make the move, how they decide when, and how the migration actually works.

It’s drawn from a live session with Stitch co-founders Michael Burton (CEO) and Bobby Tichy (Solutions Leader). Both spent more than a decade inside ExactTarget and Salesforce Marketing Cloud before going all-in on Braze in 2022. A meaningful percentage of Stitch’s growth has come from Marketing Cloud teams migrating to Braze. We scheduled the live session on October 29th — weeks before the deal was announced, and the timing turned out to be perfect.

Each section answers the questions enterprise teams ask at that stage, from “why move at all” to “what does our data team do first.” 

The short version

• Don’t buy a roadmap. Evaluate any platform against your top 10 revenue-critical use cases as they work today.
• Composability isn’t going away. Braze plus Databricks or Snowflake keeps working, and you don’t need Data 360 to run Braze.
• Migrations are faster than they used to be. Plan for 5 to 12 months, with no messaging downtime. Data strategy is the long pole, so start mapping it now.

 

 

Why enterprise teams are moving off Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Why are enterprise teams leaving Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

The same reasons come up again and again: slow innovation, an unclear product strategy, and a platform that hasn’t kept pace with what marketers need. Teams have watched Marketing Cloud Engagement stall while Marketing Cloud Next struggled to reach parity, with no clear answer on when it would. Meanwhile, they want real-time, behavior-driven messaging across email, mobile, and web from one platform. Many ended up bolting on separate SMS or mobile tools to get there. 

What did Salesforce announce about Braze?

On October 20, 2026, Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to acquire Braze for $47.50 per share in cash, an enterprise value of about $5.66 billion. The deal is expected to close in Salesforce’s fiscal 2028, which begins in February 2027. Braze co-founder and CEO Bill Magnuson is expected to stay. Until close, Braze and Salesforce remain separate, competing public companies.

Why did Salesforce buy Braze?

Our read: Salesforce’s own marketing strategy wasn’t working fast enough, and Braze was winning. Salesforce reports Marketing Cloud and Commerce together, and that segment decelerated for several years before going negative in recent quarters. Salesforce built most of its marketing suite through acquisitions (ExactTarget, Pardot, Buddy Media, Datorama and others). Marketing Cloud Next was its first serious attempt to build one in-house, but it’s built within Salesforce Core and requires Data 360 (aka Data Cloud).

If Marketing Cloud Next were broadly adopted and delivering value, Salesforce wouldn’t have spent nearly $5.7 billion on a direct competitor. The acquisition validates what Braze has been building: real-time scale, a unified profile, and composability with the data warehouse.

Is Braze a safe long-term bet for enterprise teams?

Yes, and the acquisition reinforces it. Stitch bet its business on Braze four years ago because it was winning in enterprise and offered true multi-channel from one platform. Many Marketing Cloud customers were juggling separate mobile (eg. Airship) and/or SMS tools (eg. Attentive),  to get the same coverage. Braze has since delivered strong enterprise growth quarter after quarter and has a strong global presence. The best way to judge for yourself is to read Braze’s earnings reports over time: where it’s winning, against whom, and with which brands.

Choosing Braze as an alternative to Salesforce Marketing Cloud (MCE)

What is Braze, and how is it different from Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

Braze is a customer engagement platform built on one real-time, unified profile across every channel. Marketing Cloud runs several data models side by side. Email keys off a subscriber key, while mobile and push key off a device ID or phone number. In Braze, a single external ID that you define powers email, SMS, push, in-app, and web personalization from the same profile.

That difference drives the main reasons brands switch: real-time behavioral messaging, deeper personalization, and true cross-channel journeys without stitching data models together.

Is Braze just a mobile platform?

No. Braze (formerly Appboy) has supported email since day one. Some of the largest Fortune 100 brands run all of their email, mobile, and web messaging through Braze. The idea that Marketing Cloud should handle big batch email while Braze handles real-time doesn’t hold up. Braze handles both at enterprise scale.

What AI capabilities does Braze have?

BrazeAI features are robust — including Forge 2026 releases like Operator Connect and Decisioning Studio Go, and staple features like Intelligent Timing and Agent Console. Braze has shipped AI features monthly for the past two years.

How to choose between Braze, Marketing Cloud Next, and Data 360

What happens to Marketing Cloud Engagement and Marketing Cloud Next?

Neither company has said, and the announcement doesn’t sunset anything. Our view: Braze becomes the natural replacement path for Marketing Cloud Engagement customers. Marketing Cloud Next likely finds its role in B2B use cases, possibly running alongside Braze for companies with both B2B and B2C needs. Braze has begun adding in functionality like Accounts Objects to support B2B use cases.

Should I move from Marketing Cloud Engagement to Marketing Cloud Next or to Braze?

Braze. Salesforce has just signaled its direction with a $5.7 billion bet on a platform that competes directly with Next. Today Braze is far ahead of Next on capability. One of our recent migration clients evaluated Next, but only 2 of their top 10 use cases were currently supported with MCN. The rest were on the roadmap — most of them 18+ months out. They opted to move to Braze instead. 

Our take: never buy based on a roadmap. If you’re evaluating Next, ask Salesforce for three things:

1. Live references running Next in production.
2. A projection of cost in two to three years as Data 360 consumption grows with your data, journeys, and campaigns.
3. A use-case-by-use-case answer on your top 10 revenue-critical programs, as the product works today.

Do I need Data 360 (Data Cloud) to use Braze?

No. Many Stitch customers run Braze with Sales and Service Cloud, a warehouse like Databricks or Snowflake, and their own identity solution such as LiveRamp, with no Data 360. If you already have an identity solution, keep it. Data 360 isn’t required.

Data 360 can make sense for organizations that are all-in on Salesforce across sales, service, and commerce. Even then, it’s an option rather than a dependency. Data 360 can already export audiences to an S3 bucket, and Braze ingests from S3, so you can run omnichannel messaging in Braze alongside Data 360 today. We expect a native Data 360 to Braze connector within about a year of close.

Does Braze integrate with Salesforce today?

Yes. Many Stitch customers already run Braze with Salesforce through the API, through the data warehouse, or through a Lightning component that pulls live Braze data onto contact and lead records in Sales or Service Cloud. We expect more productized integrations after close, but most of the connectivity exists now.

When to migrate from Salesforce to Braze

Should I buy Braze now or wait until the acquisition closes?

Buy now if Braze fits your use cases. Until the deal closes, Braze and Salesforce are two public companies competing with each other, which gives buyers real leverage. Waiting buys nothing: the product is the same, and your bargaining position is likely stronger today than after close.

Will my Braze contract change after Salesforce takes over?

Braze has communicated that customers’ contracts and teams will remain in place for the foreseeable future — which means if you sign before the acquisition is finalized (likely in early 2027), you’ll still be signing a Braze contract. Several brands at the finish line in recent weeks chose longer-term Braze agreements specifically to lock in terms before close. They treated the uncertainty as leverage rather than a reason to stall.

I’m on Marketing Cloud with one to two years left. What should I do?

Don’t move just to move. Start by asking whether your current stack is blocking a business outcome, such as revenue you can’t capture or efficiency you can’t reach. If it is, the acquisition improves your position. You can negotiate harder on a Salesforce renewal while seriously evaluating Braze. If you’re happy with Marketing Cloud, nothing is being sunset, and there’s no forced timeline.

How to build a strong marketing data foundation

Does the acquisition change how Braze works with Databricks and Snowflake?

No. Marketers already use Braze with Databricks and Snowflake, and we expect that to accelerate. The deal announcement explicitly emphasized composability, and announcements like this carry real weight because they set public commitments to customers and regulators.

How does Braze work with Databricks?

Braze connects to Databricks bi-directionally. Every Braze engagement event, including sends, opens, and clicks, lands as tables in your Databricks instance through data sharing. Audiences built in the warehouse, including with Databricks’ newer customer data capabilities, flow back up to Braze for activation. The result is marketing and data teams working from one source of truth instead of copying data into a separate marketing database.

Does Braze work as well with Snowflake?

Yes. Snowflake was one of Braze’s earliest technology partners, and along with Databricks, is one of the most common warehouses paired with Braze across Stitch’s client base. Braze engagement data can be shared directly into your Snowflake account, and the same warehouse-first patterns apply.

Why not use Data 360 as the data layer for marketing?

For warehouse-first companies, it’s paying rent on a house you already own. You replicate data you already store in your warehouse, then pay consumption costs to segment and compute on it, usually at a higher cost than doing the same work in the warehouse.

Am I missing out on agentic marketing if I skip Data 360 and Marketing Cloud Next?

No. Braze offers robust agentic capabilities — like Decisioning Studio, Operator Connect, Agent Console, and more. Paired with a strong data warehouse, like Databricks, brands are extremely well-positioned to adopt cutting-edge agentic marketing capabilities.

Can Databricks and Braze support regulated industries like pharma?

Yes, Stitch supports several pharma and healthcare clients across both platforms.

How a migration from Salesforce to Braze works

How long does a Marketing Cloud to Braze migration take?

Most migrations take 5 to 12 months, even for global organizations. The biggest variable is data. Many brands used Marketing Cloud as their de facto marketing data warehouse before modern warehouses were common. Relocating that data to Braze or to Databricks or Snowflake is the longest part of the timeline. Campaign rebuilds and IP warming are comparatively straightforward.

Is there downtime during a migration?

No. Messaging downtime means lost revenue, so a well-planned migration has none. Expect a period where you send from both platforms as programs move over.

Do I have to migrate every journey?

No, and you shouldn’t. Most Marketing Cloud instances carry a lot of dead weight. One financial services customer started with 1,672 journeys and migrated 312: the ones that were live and driving revenue, engagement, or decisioning.

Avoid migrating for parity. A migration is the best chance you’ll get to rebuild programs to do what your old platform couldn’t.

How does Stitch speed up migrations?

Stitch built Switch, an AI-powered migration application. Switch reads your Marketing Cloud instance through its API and documents every journey, automation, piece of content, and image. It then evaluates what to migrate based on recent usage, send volume, and trends. Along the way it often surfaces broken programs, such as triggered sends that quietly stopped firing after an API change. Switch can then migrate much of that work directly into Braze and suggest how to rebuild journeys better rather than copying them.

What happens to my AMPscript?

It gets translated to Liquid, Braze’s templating language. Stitch has translated AMPscript to Liquid for four years, including very large dynamic content blocks for major brands, and today’s LLMs handle much of the conversion well. By comparison, Marketing Cloud Next translates AMPscript to Handlebars, which is close but not one-to-one. Functions like data extension lookups have no direct Handlebars equivalent.

How does Braze replace Marketing Cloud business units?

With workspaces and more granular permissions. Braze workspaces work like business units, keeping data and content separate. Braze’s user-level permissions go further. Many franchise, multi-brand, and multi-region companies run a single workspace where each user sees only the data, campaigns, and content they’re permitted to. Admins and marketing leaders get one view across everything.

Does Braze support transactional messages?

Yes. Because Braze is built for real-time messaging, most Stitch customers run marketing, transactional, and operational messages, such as password resets, all through Braze. That often replaces a separate transactional tool like SendGrid or Amazon SES.

How do I measure the ROI of a migration?

There’s no single metric. ROI comes from two places:

• Effectiveness: incremental revenue from things you couldn’t do before, like behavioral triggers, added channels, and omnichannel journeys.
• Efficiency: faster campaign and segment builds, less QA, and less spend on outside agency support for day-to-day execution.

Define the outcomes you’re buying before you migrate, then measure against them.

What should our data team be doing now, even if renewal is a ways off?

Inventory every journey, triggered send, and user-initiated send in Marketing Cloud. Map each to the data extension it sends from, and check those fields against what’s already in your warehouse. That gap analysis is the longest pole in any migration, so doing it early shortens your timeline whenever you decide to move. Or let Stitch run Switch on your instance and hand you the gap analysis, plus what’s worth migrating, in a fraction of the time.

How to prepare your team for a possible migration

Will my Marketing Cloud skills transfer to Braze?

Yes. The data model is different, but most of what makes a strong Marketing Cloud practitioner, including channel strategy, journey design, segmentation logic, and scripting, carries straight over. Stitch has seen this firsthand. Many of our team came from Marketing Cloud and got up to speed on Braze quickly. Over the past six months, some of the most experienced Marketing Cloud architects in the industry have moved into the Braze ecosystem.

How should a Marketing Cloud expert start learning Braze?

Start with the data model. Braze is a NoSQL platform built on a unified user profile, not a relational model of data extensions. Once that clicks, the rest follows. Then:

1. Read Stitch’s Marketing Cloud to Braze migration guide for how core concepts translate between platforms.
2. Work through Braze’s learning paths, from practitioner basics to technical tracks on SDKs and cloud data ingestion with Databricks and Snowflake.
3. Earn Braze certifications and badges, which Braze keeps expanding and updating.
4. Read Braze’s last few earnings decks and transcripts to understand where the business is strong and what it emphasizes quarter after quarter.

Pay particular attention to Braze’s mobile and in-app capabilities. Interactive in-app experiences, including the branded games you see from brands like RaceTrac, are built natively in Braze, and they’re usually the biggest new opportunity for teams coming from Marketing Cloud.

Planning a move from Marketing Cloud to Braze? Stitch will run Switch on your Marketing Cloud instance and show you what you have, what’s worth migrating, and where your data gaps are, before you commit to a timeline. Talk to Stitch.

Sources

• Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Braze (Braze SEC filing, Oct 20, 2026)
• Salesforce to acquire Braze in $5.66bn deal (Financier Worldwide)

Transcript:

Hey, everyone. It’s Bobby and Michael from Stitch. When we initially planned this webinar, I think we planned this, like, what, Michael? It was, like, eight to 10 weeks ago. It’s been a while. 

Oh, wow. It has been a while. 

And, so obviously the news of last week was perfect timing. We did not plan it that way. I wish we would have. We would’ve looked really smart. 

Really excited to get into a number of different topics today as we think about Braze and Salesforce and what it means now that, they’ll ultimately at some point soon be, be part of the same organization. Like I said, my name is Bobby,  co-founder of Stitch. I lead our solutions team, so I spend all day, every day talking to brands that are either leaving Salesforce or thinking about leaving Salesforce and migrating to Braze. 

Michael is our CEO and co-founder, and both of us spent more than a decade in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud ecosystem, first at ExactTarget, and then Salesforce through the acquisition, and then as a SI consulting partner, for a number of years before we joined the Braze ecosystem about four years ago.

And Stitch builds on both ends of what we think of as the modern composable MarTech stack with Databricks and Braze. As we’re going through today, feel free to drop in questions at any time. We’ll try to get to them as we’re going through this live and then we’ll have some time at the end earmarked for some Q&A as well.

Yeah, and like Bobby said, we’re kind of changing a little bit. Before we were actually like, “We’re not going to highlight Braze much at all.” I mean, clearly we have an opinion, a strong opinion about Braze and how we see it performing against Salesforce, but we’re going to kind of pivot a little bit. I think people are interested in, “What is Braze? How does it fit in? Why does Salesforce make this move?”

And I’ll be the first one to say, there’s a lot that we have opinions on, and we’ll be very frank about that because the actual amount of information out there from Braze and Salesforce is fairly limited, primarily a press release that will ultimately go to the Justice Department as they’re evaluating this deal.

So if you look at it on the surface now, what we know is this deal is expected to close in Braze’s FY28, which starts in February. So where I’m kind of guessing is probably between February, March, February, April. So there’s quite a bit of time before a deal gets done. Bill Magnuson is expected to… has said he’s going to continue to stay, which is a key part of the Braze, kind of the team, the product, et cetera. And there’s some things in there about composability and how it would fit into the overall strategy with Salesforce, which we’ll get into and give you our own opinion. But, I do think there’s a lot of misinformation out there, so we’re just going to try to get this grounded in as much as we know and from our perspective.

And as Bobby mentioned, I do think we’ve got a really interesting perspective in the fact that we’ve been inside of Salesforce, we’ve been inside of ExactTarget. We spent the last four years migrating a lot of customers to Braze. Some of them — not all of them from Salesforce. A lot of Adobe, Cheetah, Oracle, Iterable, Zeta, etc.

But what we can say is the majority of the customers that we have become new, net new customers to Stitch are migrating from Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Braze. So we’ll try to give you what we hear every day from customers on Salesforce, what we’ve heard in the past week. So we’ll definitely dig into a lot of that.

I think to kind of ground everyone, if you’re in the Salesforce world, you’ll know that most of what was marketing, has really been acquired. So I won’t go through the full list, but Buddy Media, Radius6, Exact Target, which included Pardot, Datorama, Crux, Evergage. I’m probably missing some, Bobby, but like if you think about it, the Marketing Cloud Next was one of the first legitimate attempts by Salesforce to build something on their own.

And there were some other aspects of it, but fairly new for Salesforce to make a big move into this. So what we’ve seen, just as we kind of start this webinar here, I want to kind of first talk, and then Bobby will get into more of the product on the Braze side. But what we hear from customers over the last four years that have made the move from Salesforce to Braze, what we hear from them is that they’ve been frustrated.

You know, this collection of a lot of products, many of them fantastic products that Bobby and I were a part of, those teams as well. But over time, there’s not a really clear strategy on what was going to happen with what became Marketing Cloud Engagement. And then what happened was Marketing Cloud Next, and how quickly was Marketing Cloud Next going to be rebuilt on core and incorporate a lot of the aspects of what was in Marketing Cloud.

That was kind of a bumpy journey. I mean, truly for… as we hear from customers frustrated with the lack of innovation, not a clear strategy. And what it led to, this is just Salesforce talking, if you look past, look at the last several years, Marketing Cloud and Commerce, which they report together, were decelerating significantly over the last several years.

And then if you look at the last several quarters, it was not just decelerating, it was going negative. So they were losing market share and a lot of customers were not just going to Braze, but definitely we saw a fair share of customers making that move as customers who were just frustrated with what was happening, that lack of innovation, again, lack of a clear strategy.

And that’s really just one part of the story and, because it’s complex, every customer has a lot of complex reasons why they decide to move. Another reason is just the product didn’t keep up with what marketers need today, and that was a big reason we have been able to gain so much share of Salesforce customers to Braze for the last several years.

So Bobby, maybe can you help kind of educate the group? I know everyone here is like, “What exactly is Braze? Why has it been winning?” Because I think that will help inform why Salesforce decided to make this investment. 

Yeah, for sure. Braze is a customer engagement platform, and the main difference between Braze and if we think about Salesforce Marketing Cloud or Adobe orOracle Marketing Cloud is that it’s built off of a real-time unified profile across channels.

And what I mean by that is for those of you who are familiar with Salesforce Marketing Cloud, there are many data models inside of that platform, right? You’ve got your email data model, which is historically ExactTarget, and then push and mobile were bolted on later. Those are based off of a device ID or based off of a mobile number as the unique identifier, whereas in Marketing Cloud proper or ExactTarget, you’ve got a subscriber key that might be email address or it might be a different GUID or unique ID that you, that you build off of.

The biggest difference with Braze is that you are leveraging a unified profile. So inside of Braze, the unique identifier is called an external ID that you set as a brand, could be a GUID, a unique identifier, whatever that might be internally for you is what is set at the Braze level, and that same profile is used across every single channel.

So whether you’re sending an email, you’re downloading the mobile app, you are on the website and doing personalization through the web SDK, all of these different things function off of one profile, which is a huge value add, obviously, especially when you’re looking at deploying messaging at one, at scale, and then two, across multiple different channels.

The biggest wins are kind of where we see a lot of folks coming over to Braze is, one, where they do want to become more real time. They want to focus more on personalization. Scale is another big thing. I’ve seen recently on LinkedIn and people commenting about, you know, maybe there’s a world where Salesforce Marketing Cloud or what’s now called Marketing Cloud Engagement is leveraged for, you know, large batch email sends while Braze does real-time messaging.

That couldn’t be further from the truth. Braze’s scale is phenomenal. There are some of the largest Fortune 100 brands doing all of their email, all of their mobile, all of their web messaging through Braze today. And in addition to that, there’s a lot of AI features. Braze has done a really good job of rolling out, over the course of the last twenty-four months, every single month, updated releases.

So they have a feature called Agent Console, where you can build in agents directly within the platform. Just this week, they launched their agentic standards, which allows you to put in the specific standards that you have as a brand that will double-check campaigns before they launch, so that way your QA and your errors are cut down as well.

The other key component to Braze and why it’s been such a big favorable way of migrating and kind of moving off of these historical legacy marketing clouds is the composability, and it’s built really around the warehouse. So you can absolutely store all of your data inside of Braze if you want to on a unified profile.

You can store supplemental data in catalogs. And they’re essentially just data tables where you can have additional data. But Braze also connects to every major data warehouse in a very easy and bi-directional manner. So Databricks, being one of the main ones where you have open sharing.

So every single thing that happens inside of Braze, an open, a click, a send, all those different interactions just show up as tables inside of your Databricks instance. And then also with some of the things that Databricks is rolling out, like CustomerLake, for example, where you can start to do segmentation inside of your warehouse, push that up to Braze.

Braze has become very embedded with the warehouses, and we don’t see that changing. Obviously, things can change over time, but considering how composability has struck such a chord, not only with marketers, but with tech people as well — it’s really been interesting to see how marketers have kind of shifted their thought process to being not just marketing, but marketing and data, marrying Braze and the data warehouse together.

And so then from there, it kind of lends itself to, okay, with the news from last week, where does Braze fit into the Salesforce stack? And a lot of the things that we’ll talk about today, we don’t know for a fact, right? We don’t know that Braze is going to be standalone, on its own. But the way we kind of see this working based on our experience over the last fifteen plus years is we really kind of feel like this will — Braze will kind of be on its own within the Salesforce stack, but then become interoperable with everything that Salesforce obviously has.

So connectors to sales, service, commerce, all those different things. If you’re a big Salesforce shop, you probably were really excited about the news last week because you’re not having to be forced to push to Marketing Cloud Next, and you’ve got a really powerful customer engagement platform now in the family.

And I think  a lot of times people don’t really realize that Braze, a lot of our customers leverage Braze and Salesforce together today. It’s already interoperable in a lot of different ways. So we already have Braze connected into Salesforce through the API or through the data warehouse, or through a Lightning component, where they’re actually pulling data live from Braze at the time that they’re pulling up a contact or a lead record inside of Sales or Service Cloud.

So there’s a lot of those components already in play. I think what we’ll ultimately see is there will be more connection, more kind of like standard or productized integrations between the two, but much of the connectivity is already there. 

So the next question that we’ve heard a lot is, “Do I go ahead and buy Braze now? Do I hold off until the acquisition is complete?” Our strong recommendation to the brands that we’re talking to, or even people who might be in contracting, you know, they’ve been talking to Braze for a while and they’re about to go down this path of moving from Salesforce to Braze, is absolutely. Now, now is the perfect time to do this.

The other thing that is really interesting is that obviously with Salesforce Marketing Cloud Next, Salesforce has not made any announcements or plans for what this will ultimately look like. But what was really interesting, is with the acquisition of Braze last week, Salesforce basically confirmed the hypothesis of [Marketing Cloud] Next isn’t working.

If Marketing Cloud Next had been this unbelievable adopted platform that everyone loved and that marketers were getting a lot of value out of, they absolutely would not have bought Braze. That would not have been the situation. So they’re really confirming everything that Braze has been building over the last 10-plus years, the scale, the composability. Everything that Braze has stood for, Salesforce essentially confirmed it.

Well, Bobby, I’m curious about that one, because there was a question about this too. So, there’s nothing in the press release that’s specifically talking about here’s exactly where Next fits in.

You know, there’s no sun setting on [Marketing Cloud] Engagement. It’s really high level, right? Because there’s probably still a lot they haven’t figured out yet. Everyone has different opinions about this, and you and I haven’t even talked about this directly, but you know my opinion when I think about where Braze fits in, because it does.

We have customers where it fits in today into their Salesforce stack. Like, that’s a normal piece, and I think that can continue to get better and better. There’s clearly a lot of overlap with Braze and [Marketing Cloud] Engagement. You know, what was ExactTarget, etc. Like, it’s been more my view is that initially Braze becomes the replacement cycle for Marketing Cloud Engagement.

Uh, [Marketing Cloud] Next likely has a life more as a B2B platform. Although I would argue we’ve got a lot of Braze customers that are doing B2B use cases, but maybe that becomes the short-term answer. And either they have Marketing Cloud Next as B2B and Braze as more B2C, or in time, they just build out the Braze functionality that becomes more and more B2B.

I don’t know. You’re closer to this day-to-day and talking to customers that are on [Marketing Cloud] Next or they’re looking at [Marketing Cloud] Next or looking at their own engagement as well. What are you seeing? What are you hearing? What are you thinking about? 

Yeah, there are two components of it I think that are interesting. One is, you know, I would say over the last six months here at Stitch, we’ve had an influx of some of the best Salesforce Marketing Cloud architects in the world join Stitch, and in turn, join the Braze ecosystem, right? Because they saw Marketing Cloud Next. They started implementing Data Cloud, and they were like, “Oh, this is not, this is not going to work.This is not the way that the people should be going.” 

And so they — coming into the Braze ecosystem, again, was kind of validation of some of those things that you’re talking about. I think in the world of Marketing Cloud Next, the biggest issue that folks are having is that right now, of their top use cases, they aren’t able to achieve a lot of those.

So, for example, we had a retailer who was going through this evaluation of Marketing Cloud Next and Braze, and only 10 of their top use cases were going to be able to be achieved through Marketing Cloud Next. And so, obviously, Salesforce, like any product company in a sales cycle, would say, “Well, in the next 12 months we’ll be able to achieve all of your use cases.”

And that’s a really big distinction, right? Because we, you know, almost like we see on every single product, webinar or presentation is that forward-looking statement. And you never want to buy anything based off of a forward-looking statement, so you don’t want buy anything based off of a roadmap.

So that’s where I think the two biggest things are kind of validation of Braze and kind of the undercutting of Marketing Cloud Next have happened. Michael, from your point of view, as you’re talking to marketing leaders and industry experts, what has their reaction been to the potential of almost basically kind of Salesforce moving people from Marketing Cloud Engagement over to Braze?

I think that the very real answer is, I think there was initial shock about it, frankly. So I think people have just have been spending the past week just trying to understand, “Hey, what does this, what does this mean?” And there’s a lot more questions about, why did Salesforce make this move? Because to your point, Bobby, it kind of highlighted that something with the strategy that Salesforce was executing on wasn’t right, wasn’t working as well as they wanted, better way to say it. 

Mm-hmm. 

And so much so that they’re going to spend, you know, five point, nearly $5.7 billion of cash, to go fix it.

I think I heard yesterday this was the sixth-largest acquisition Salesforce had done. I think I heard that fact or that stat yesterday. So I think the initial piece is just trying to understand more about Braze because, like I do think while we live in Braze every single day, we still talk to marketing leaders that are, were really unaware of Braze.

Or their understanding of Braze was just limited. You know, they would, I think, would talk about, “Well, it’s a mobile platform,” which is not accurate. Actually, Appboy, which was what it was called before, had email day one, to your point about email. 

Mm-hmm. 

And so I think, right, the first part was just them just trying to understand what does this mean?

And I think as people start to take a moment and step back, I think that they’re realizing that these marketers actually have good leverage. Whether your [Marketing Cloud] Engagement renewal is coming up or you’re looking at Braze today or maybe you’re in contracting with Braze, I think a lot of them are understanding they’ve got a lot more options than they necessarily had before.

The initial shock is, “Oh, integration. Here we go again with Salesforce. What does this mean for Braze?” But I think as you really kind of take a step back, you’re like, “Hey, if you’re a marketer and you’re evaluating a lot of options, you have more leverage today than you did yesterday if you’re in the Salesforce ecosystem.”

Yeah, speaking of that, like being in the Salesforce ecosystem, Donna asked a really good question in the chat of what’s the best place that someone with strong skills in ExactTarget and Salesforce should go to understand the benefits and how the functionality translates from Salesforce to Marketing Cloud to Braze.

First, hey, Donna, it’s good to see you. The second part is the best way to kind of start on this, especially if you’re a practitioner, if you’re in Marketing Cloud every day, and you want to try to understand what Braze looks like, is start with the data model. It is different.

It is not a relational data model. Braze is a no SQL platform, so again, it’s based on that unified profile. There are a couple of good places to start. One actually is the Stitch website. We have a lot of content outlining the main differences between the two platforms and how people can think about those things.

The other thing I would take a look at as well is understanding how that unified profile works inside of Braze. And Donna, I think you and other architects or consultants, or practitioners in the brand or inside of brands, once you understand that unified profile, you’ll start… everything else will start to click outside of that.

Obviously, most of the channel capability, like email, SMS, mobile, a lot of that transitions from platform to platform. I think the other big thing that you’ll find in Braze is the mobile and web capabilities are incredible, especially on the mobile side. So the custom in-app messages and all of the games that you see on some of your favorite brands, like Taco Bell, all of those are built inside of Braze.

There’s no third-party tool that they’re using to build that as well. So I think that will be the other big learning curve and another big opportunity for folks as they come into the Braze ecosystem. 

Hey, Bobby. You talked a little bit about composability, interoperability. The question that I’ve heard a lot over the past week, I know you have as well, is that especially those, customers that we were, prospects that we were talking to who did not like the idea of having to have to use Dat360, Data Cloud inside of as they had to go move, there was a lot of pushback on that.

What are you hearing now? Like what do you think Braze and Salesforce in the press release talking about composability, what does that mean for Data 360 and marketing moving forward? There was a question about this as well. It’s definitely something that’s come up a lot over the past week.

I wrote about this, I think last week — I don’t like the idea of paying rent on a house you already own. And what I mean by that is basically having all of your data inside of a data warehouse, and then you’re replicating that data inside of Data Cloud. And then the consumption, and to build segments, and to do a lot of calculation on Data Cloud is more expensive than it is at the warehouse level. 

So I think that’s why in that press release they made such a big emphasis on composability because I think that they understand that’s why a lot of people move to Braze to begin with, is they see the power of being able to, like, basically bring my warehouse, bring my customer engagement platform together.

Anything else I need to, I can do that interoperably and not have to have something like a Data Cloud in the middle. Now, I think obviously, in the first, I would imagine the first 12 months after the acquisition closes, we’re absolutely going to have a connector from Data Cloud to Braze, and vice versa.

And rightfully so because there are a lot of organizations who have leveraged Data Cloud as their CDP, as their kind of, golden data layer, which makes a lot of sense for organizations who are all in on Salesforce across sales, service, commerce, community cloud, you name it. There are a lot of companies out there that have everything under the Salesforce sun.

And so having Data Cloud on top of all of those things makes a ton of sense. And then if you’re able to then bolt on Braze inside of that ecosystem to drive real-time messaging and kind of be the next version of what Marketing Cloud Engagement could be, I think there’s a lot of opportunity there. 

Yeah, I think some people just can be — it can be really easy to dismiss a press release where you say, “Hey, we’re committing to composability.” But like, these are actually serious documents. These are, like I said earlier, these are documents that actually go to the government to get approved. You set a really high bar to customers and prospects of what you’re committing to. So I think you’re right.

I think people ask us, “Well, how does this fit in with what Stitch does with Databricks?” And we’ve just said it doesn’t change anything. And like, marketers are already using Databricks, they’re using Snowflake with Braze, and we don’t see that slowing down. In fact, I think we continue to see it really accelerate.

A question came up that actually I’ve — it’s a good question I’ve not, I’ve not really thought it through very much, but this idea of let’s play out one scenario. There could be lots of different scenarios, but like, if [Marketing Cloud] Next is more B2B and Braze is more B2C, or if there’s a world in which they mix, which it’s difficult to see that.

Like, do you see a path where Marketing Cloud Next is somehow integrated into Braze and what that may look like? 

That’s a good question. I could definitely see a world where, you know, if you’re a company that has, maybe you’re already using Marketing Cloud Next or you have very specific B2B use cases, I could definitely see a world where they would be interoperable with one another.

Especially because Braze is primarily built as a B2C platform. There is B2B functionality within it, but it’s not on par with, you know, what used to be Pardot or Marketo or any of those true B2B tools. So I think that’s where Marketing Cloud Next can really provide value to a brand.

And then having those two things together would be really interesting

Rob asked, “Stitch specializes in integrating Braze with Databricks. How compatible would Snowflake be instead of Databricks?” Basically you can think about it the same exact way. Snowflake was one of the early tech partners of Braze. Braze is partially built on Snowflake, and so just like Databricks has open sharing, Snowflake has Delta Share. So where you can have those tables go directly into your Snowflake instance for all engagement inside of Braze.And I would say that outside of Databricks, Snowflake is the most integrated technology among our client base with Braze. So it works with Braze incredibly well.

There’s a question about Databricks and compliance. You want to handle it, want to talk about?

I mean, I have a viewpoint when it comes to Databricks and thinking about having patient data. What we see is, one of the great things about Databricks is governance.

I mean, it’s one of the things that they bring up all the time on compliance. So if you even go look at some of their case studies that they highlight, there’s a lot in the pharma med device space for them. So as far as something like we’re highly compliance data structure, I mean, I think Databricks has been phenomenal on that front.

Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, we have multiple pharma clients who are leveraging Databricks as not only their data warehouse, but also their, what they kind of call Customer 360 or their kind of version of the CDP before CustomerLake was announced. So as far as compliance, security, privacy, all of those different things, Databricks is on the cutting edge of those things, which obviously is why we’re so bullish on it, especially in conjunction with Braze.

Going back to Braze, Michael, the one thing that I think we haven’t talked about this as much, but to your point earlier about like marketing leaders not having a lot of awareness around Braze, I think what’s been interesting is over the last, you know, nine days since the acquisition was announced, more people have kind of been open to asking the question, “What even is Braze?”

I mean, I — we, we bet Stitch on Braze, right? We felt very confident about their long-term future because they were winning in the enterprise space. They had true multi-channel, which is becoming important. You know, we talked to a lot of Salesforce customers who are on Attentive, and they’ve got Salesforce, and they’ve got another mobile solution that’s in the mix as well. And so I think when we looked at that opportunity, I think that is what got us excited about what we thought Braze would be.

And so, like, that’s exactly what Braze has delivered, kind of quarter over quarter, strong growth in enterprise, winning in that legacy space. Clearly, we have an opinion about what we think about Braze, even against some of the newer generation marketing solutions out there. But we just see them, like, winning.

I think that that’s a unique perspective that we bring in seeing Braze consistently win and also win globally. So I think people are even surprised that Braze’s international growth, their revenue, forty-five percent of it is international markets. And I think a lot of people would assume, even I did when we first started working with Braze, that, you know, like, oh, they’re probably not going to have a large international footprint.

But if you take a step back and you objectively look at them as truly kind of a next gen marketing tool that in a lot of cases has been leveraging AI and ML for ten plus years and now is continuing to be a leader in the space, you recognize they’ve done a great job. 

And then you just look at their financials. That’s why I always tell people that if you’re trying to understand Braze, a good place to start is just to go look at their earnings, look about what they say, look at who they’re winning, what kind of brands they are talking about. And I think that’s what we’ve been really, really excited to see is that Braze growth and winning across not just Salesforce, but across a lot of different competitors that they’re going up against, and they’re a much smaller company.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, a couple questions that came in. So one around AMPscript, and what that looks like. So in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, AMPscript is the scripting language.

Marketing Cloud Next does support AMPscript, but basically what happens behind the scenes is that AMPscript is translated to Handlebars. So it’s close to a one-to-one, but there are still going to be things that are not included. For example, if you have AMPscript that’s doing a lookup row to a data extension, there’s no Handlebar equivalent to that.

So you’ll lose that type of functionality. Obviously, the thought is that you’re moving a lot of your data into more of the Salesforce ecosystem, outside of Marketing Cloud, so you wouldn’t need those things. But these are just some things to keep in mind that if you were to go to Marketing Cloud Next, it’s not going to be a true one-to-one comparison between AMPscript and then what Handlebars has.

Braze’s scripting language is called Liquid. Liquid, we’ve been translating AMPscript  to Liquid, for four years now.  I will say, Claude does it incredibly well at this point. So I’m sure a lot of you are leveraging Claude or ChatGPT, something along those lines. So if you’re thinking about making the move but you’ve got very heavily dynamic, very, very large blocks of AMPscript that are driving your messages, that’s not a problem.

Large brands have made that switch, have translated all of their messaging and dynamic elements over to Liquid. The other thing that we have in here in the questions is around, Data 360. Basically if we forego Data 360 and Marketing Cloud Next and stick to Marketing Cloud Engagement for now and then move to Databricks and Braze combination, are we missing out on anything agentically? 

I think the — just a really quick element on Databricks. I think this is another area where, kind of like with Braze, I think people just don’t understand how powerful the platform is. You can build anything that you want inside of Databricks, and I know that probably sounds like a cheesy response to a question, but you can build…

Like, for example, we have built custom apps inside of Databricks that help identify which hot food items are going to drive more revenue for a convenience store. For a pharma company, we’re helping — we’re leveraging Databricks to drive what should be the next best piece of content for people to make sure that they continue on with their treatment.

There’s so much that you can do inside of Databricks, not only out of the box, but then you can build whatever you want within that platform. So you, number one, you will not miss out on anything agentically, because Databricks is an incredibly powerful platform. And you’ll actually have more access to build things out faster inside of Databricks than if you were to stick with 360 on its own.

Hey, Bobby. One of the things that we want to make sure that we get to as well is two big topics on what should brands be doing now? Like, when is the right time to look? And then we definitely want to talk about if you’re looking to move to a platform, to Braze, like how to prepare.

But there’s a lot of questions about, “Hey, if we’re in an RFP right now,” or they have — you have maybe we’ve got two years into our renewal with [Marketing Cloud] Engagements and Next are up. You have this conversation like all the time. We’re getting these questions as customers are in RFP.

Like, what are you telling people today, whether they’re an RFP now or they’re going to be renewing in a couple years, what should they be thinking of? 

Yeah, I think for folks who are signing a contract with Braze in the near term, basically before the acquisition is closed, or even shortly after the acquisition is closed, based on experience, right — we can’t say for a fact this is what’s going to happen, but based on experience, you’re still going to be signing a Braze contract for the foreseeable future. So that’s one thing to keep in mind. The second is we’ve had a couple of customers in the last few weeks who were basically at the finish line about to sign with Braze to migrate away from Salesforce, and they actually — a few of them actually did a longer term agreement with Braze because they wanted to lock in certain elements of their contract they thought might change once the Salesforce acquisition happens.

If you’re kind of in the middle contract point, and you’re kind of thinking about an RFP at some point in the next twelve months, maybe you’ve got two years left on your contract, I think that, Michael, I’ve heard you say this a number of times, waiting buys nothing.

Like, you waiting until the last second to see what this ultimately looks like, we are obviously huge fans of Braze and the platform that it’s built, and we think it is the future of customer engagement for brands. And so if you’re looking at just the kind of like the raw facts of what’s happened, right?

Salesforce building out Marketing Cloud Next, that future right now is completely uncertain to me. Because if you’ve spent nearly six billion dollars on a platform that directly competes with the platform you were trying to rebuild, then if I’m Salesforce, I’m going to push that platform over this Marketing Cloud Next platform that we still have to build and try to figure out if it’s even going to work.

And it’s not even on par with Marketing Cloud Engagement, let alone Braze. So when we think about it, should I move now? Does it make sense to? It totally makes sense to continue the process of either moving if you’re in the middle of it, or looking to move to Braze if you’re on Marketing Cloud Engagement.

And I think this goes back to, like, an earlier point that I was trying to articulate. You have a lot of leverage. I think in, in almost every scenario here, whether you… Maybe you’re not up for renewal,  but there’s something limiting you in the tech stack, right? I never recommend people should move just to move.

You’re making a move because you’re expecting to see an outcome, right? You’re not able to capture a certain amount of revenue. You’re trying to find cost efficiencies. It’s not just a move to move, and we talk about that all the time at Stitch. So if you are seeing you’re on Salesforce, and you’re happy with things are, are how they’re going, I don’t think you’re going to be…

Like, there’s no sunsetting here. If you are a couple of years out from renewal, but your tech stack is limiting you on an outcome for your business, I think that’s to your advantage. I think you can be negotiating a lot more with Salesforce as far as looking at another platform with Braze. I think if you’re contracting with Braze, you’ve got a lot more leverage today than you did two weeks ago on what these, how they are structured and how do you get comfortable long term with an agreement.

Or I even say if you’ve got a renewal coming up in, you know, six months, like, Salesforce never likes to… nope, it’s not picking on Salesforce. No company likes to do short-term extensions, right? They’re trying to lock you in longer term. It’s smart for their business too. But I think even in some cases where maybe you’re running up against a deadline, you probably also have more flexibility and leverage today if you’re going to say, “I’m looking at Braze right now,” and they are two publicly traded companies that are competing with each other until this deal closes.

But there’s also been a clear signal to the market about what Salesforce wants to go do. So those are the kinds of things that  if I’m in your shoes today, looking at these different scenarios, know that the leverage is really with you. 

Yeah, I, and I think too, like there’s some specific things you can think through as well. If you’re in a conversation right now with Salesforce about Marketing Cloud Next, there are a couple of key questions that if I were in your shoes, I would be asking the Salesforce team is, is one, I’d like to talk to live references. I want to talk to people who have actually built on this thing and are doing well in production.

Number two is, what is this cost going to look like in a couple of years when my consumption goes up? And obviously there’s the Data 360 requirement for Marketing Cloud Next. So the — that consumption, you know, things typically don’t go down in price, it’s only going to go up and obviously as you add in more data and you build out more journeys and more campaigns.

And then kind of what we talked about earlier with that retailer example we shared, like write out your top 10 use cases. Not just we have a lot of journeys to migrate, but more about what’s revenue impacting, what’s critical to the business. Write out those things and see what could Marketing Cloud Next actually help with.

And then obviously the thing to keep in the back of your head is Braze. Like what, what does that impact have on the roadmap for Marketing Cloud Next? Is that going to change it? Obviously there are a lot of unknowns still between Marketing Cloud Next and Braze. And so just to start thinking through those things and then start doing some research on Braze as well.

Because obviously Braze is a superior platform compared to Marketing Cloud Next right now. It’s not even close. But if you are built on Data 360, if you do have strong B2B use cases that you need to account for, there might be a really good scenario where both might be in play.

So Bobby, some of these customers that we talked with, some of these customers that are our customers now were actually our customers thirteen years ago at Exact Target. So it’s kind of funny to see that continue to play out. Everyone is always concerned about complexity and cost to do a migration.

I’m looking at a couple of questions here. Someone that’s on, you know, B2B, B2C, Salesforce Core, Interaction Studio, and it’s deeply embedded in their business. How do you talk to brands about preparing to make a move? What does that move look like? Like, how seamless can this be based off of all the experiences that we’ve seen over the last four years?

Yeah, I think, well, since we’ve been doing this so much and we have such a big background in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, we actually built a migration application called Switch. And what it does is it reads your Salesforce Marketing Cloud instance. One of the things that I still love about Salesforce Marketing Cloud is how API first the platform is.

So we’re able to take every piece of content, every image, every journey, every Automation Studio interaction, all of those different activities, we’re able to pull those down and document those things and then have AI help us figure out what should be migrated versus what shouldn’t be. So we have a LLM model, called Switch, that basically after everything is documented, we go through it one by one, and we figure out if it has been used recently? What’s the send volume? Has it been going down over time? 

A lot of times when you go through migrations, you find things too that you didn’t even know were a problem. You realize that triggered sends inside of Marketing Cloud haven’t been sending for three weeks because there was an update to an API process, and it broke that API call.

And so you have all this opportunity to kind of figure out what does that look like in the future. And so based on that, then we kind of provide an output of what the migration should look like. And what’s really nice, too, with Braze and their AI components and how open their platform is, is a lot of these things we can actually migrate through this application.

So it’s, obviously it’s not — I’m not saying it’s quick or it’s easy or by the flip of a switch, all of a sudden you’re migrated over to Braze. Nothing like that. But it does make it a lot easier than it was, say, a year ago, two years ago, where you’re having to manually document every single journey, every single campaign.

You’re having to do manual segmentation for IP warming. You don’t have to do those things anymore because LLMs have and MCP servers have made that process much faster. And especially as you move over to Braze, I think what we find from a lot of brands is they end up cutting quite a bit of fat from what was in Marketing Cloud already.

So you might look and see, “Oh my gosh, we have three hundred and forty-seven journeys, and I have no idea how we’re going to migrate those.” Well, I would assume that all three hundred and forty-seven of those are not live. So right there, you’re cutting down a big portion of them. Number two is, are they actually valuable? Are they driving revenue? Are they driving engagement for the business? 

Migrating is a phenomenal time to look at the effectiveness of our marketing program and to see what I basically cut down from there. I’ll give a quick example. We recently helped a financial services customer migrate to Braze, and they had one thousand six hundred and seventy-two journeys in their instance.

Obviously, not all of those were live. We basically cut those, that one thousand six hundred and seventy-two, down to three hundred and twelve of actual campaigns that were live, that were driving either some kind of decisioning, revenue, engagement. So that way, again, it’s not a, “Oh my gosh, we’ve got all this we have to migrate.” It’s really a time to figure out how, how can I migrate the things that are important and also kind of restart or kickstart my marketing program. 

Sometimes I also like, to your, kind of your commentary around, like, how do you make it more efficient? And it’s, and sometimes it’s not even just about, like, cutting it back, but also what always frustrated me all the years that we’ve done migrations is just the parity.

Like, let’s just migrate the parity. Oh, yeah. Like, why are you migrating to parity? Like, that’s not… If you’re going to go through this work, it doesn’t make any sense to go do that. So it’s really much more about, how do we, how do we leverage Braze to make something better that you weren’t doing before?

And that is where I, I love, like, this whole movement to be more headless and thinking about Operator Connect, which is what Braze has, is kind of like their headless piece. But connecting that with Switch, we can now, I think it’s the coolest thing to go through and say, “Let’s take this journey. Hey, Braze, knowing what you know about your functionality, how we could best recreate this, how would we redo this? How would we make this better?” 

It doesn’t just have to be a parity. And that’s actually one of the things I get most excited about, that when brands are taking the time to really think through this versus, you know, it’s six months from a Salesforce contract renewal, and it’s like, “Just get it through.” I don’t think that’s in their best, the best interest of the customer to go do that… That’s why we like to work with customers before and really help plan for this, because that’s the benefit. It’s not just doing a hard migration.It’s actually getting something more from it than what you had. 

Yeah, and one thing that we’ve, kind of along that same path of, like, moving to parity, I think the other thing we’ve started to hear recently too is, as a brand side marketer, I’ve spent a large amount of my career getting skills inside of Salesforce Marketing Cloud or learning how to be a little bit more technical so I can write the right query to be able to get the audience that I want to be able to send this campaign.

Michael, from, from your perspective, for those who are kind of concerned about, like, their job or their skills moving because they might be migrating to Braze or implementing Braze, what would be, what would your advice or your thoughts be to them? 

I mean, we live this firsthand. So many people that are at Stitch came from a Salesforce Marketing Cloud background, and what we’ve seen is like, yeah, some of the things are different.

Bobby was talking about the user profile versus how you think about data structures and, and marketing cloud engagement. They are different, but so many of the things are applicable across technologies that we’ve been able to see our team get up to speed very, very quickly. So when we’re looking to hire and bring people in, we’re looking for people who are marketing tech experts.

You know, there’s a finite pool of people that are Braze experts, but I think you should have a lot of confidence that what you’ve built up over the years and your expertise in Salesforce marketing, uh, you’re going to continue to benefit off of that moving to Braze. We truly live it firsthand every day.

Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I think that just the… If you think about it, Salesforce buying Braze just gave you a whole new platform to become an expert in. Looks like we’ve got a few more questions. Um, Pradeep, is it wise to move to Marketing Cloud Next if you’re currently using Salesforce Marketing Cloud or to Braze in the long run?

Braze. 

Yeah, this is the one where I, I mean, we’ve seen a lot of opinions, and I don’t know why you would even consider Marketing Cloud Next in that scenario because Salesforce has said, “Here’s really the direction.” And frankly, it wouldn’t surprise me…

Again, they’re two publicly traded companies, they’re competitors, but it wouldn’t even surprise me if your Salesforce AE is asking you about Marketing Cloud Next and you say, “We’re really looking at Braze.” My guess, you’re going to get a lot of responses of, “Yeah, that makes sense.” I think that’s kind of really where Salesforce is going.

And so, I think it’s the most obvious thing, and it’s… Yes, we are biased, and we’re openly biased about that, but I think Salesforce is sending a very clear message about [Marketing Cloud] Next and Braze. 

Mm-hmm. And  the other question comes similarly around, around Marketing Cloud Next and Braze is, leveraging Data 360 using Marketing Cloud for journeys, but doesn’t work for omni-channel, which, you know, we talked about a little bit earlier and just the challenges there.

I would not go to Marketing Cloud Next for that purpose. I would absolutely… I mean, you could start leveraging Braze in that situation today. Data Cloud can output, or Data 360 can output, an individual or an audience to an S3 bucket. Braze easily integrates to S3 buckets.

So even today, you could leverage omni-channel inside of Braze in addition to having Data 360.

Bobby, if there’s more questions that come in, please keep them coming. We love them. Thanks for throwing them in there, and it’s great to see some names we’ve seen in the past too, popping up in the questions. Bobby, migrations, one question that we get, downtime, what does it look like? Is there downtime? How do we make this as seamless as possible? 

Yeah. There’s zero downtime during a migration. Like, as you all know on the call, you cannot have downtime for messaging. It’s a non-starter because you’re leaving revenue on the table, and you’re leaving engagement on the table, with which any CMO that you would ask would never be okay with. If we’re going to migrate to something new and we’re going to lose revenue in the short term, would you be okay with that? Of course, they’re going to say no. And so as you’re going through that process, what you just gotta make sure to do is plan accordingly. There’s certainly a time where you’re sending from both platforms as you migrate over, but there’s never any true downtime during that process

Beatriz, I didn’t capture that considering that answer. What about Data 360? Can you give us some more on that one?

Oh, so you’ve already got a data identity solution. Like,  I think if I’m understanding the question correctly, you’ve already got an identity solution. Do you also need Data 360 on top of that? If that’s the crux of the question, you absolutely do not. We have many customers who are running Braze, they’re running Sales and Service Cloud, they have a data warehouse like Databricks or Snowflake, and they also have their own identity provider, like a LiveRamp or they’re leveraging a different identity graph. So you absolutely don’t need it for that purpose, especially if you’ve already got one in place 

So, how can you measure the ROI of a migration? Boy, that is a hard question. That’s a really difficult question. I think, I mean, Michael, you said it earlier, is one, you have to make sure that you’re not just leveraging or you’re not looking at a migration as parity. If you’re looking at it as, you know, we’re just going to migrate over, because, for very basic reasons, you’re not going to get any ROI on that, on that prospect.

But what you have to do is figure out what, what are things we can’t do today that are going to be a value-add to us? Is it new campaigns? Is it omni-channel capabilities? Something along those lines to where we can actually expect incremental revenue. Or the other side of that is efficiency. So inside of Braze, building campaigns, building segments, is much faster than what you’re experiencing now in Marketing Cloud.

And so, that’s the other aspect of that too. So is it less that you have to pay an agency or a consultancy to help you day-to-day? Is it less that you have to pay, or less time you have to spend deploying a campaign, so you’ve got more time to think about new strategies or new types of campaigns that you could roll out? You know, now that you’ve got more time, you could roll out a new decisioning element inside of your campaigns. All these different things, but it’s typically either efficiency or effectiveness, one, it’s something that’s reducing time or two, something that’s driving incremental revenue.

What about Braze and transactional? 

Oh, yeah. Braze is very strong in transactional communications, especially because, like I said, the whole platform is built on real-time communication. And so obviously marketing, transactional, and operational as well. So password resets, things like that are all, for most of our clients, all of that is going through Braze. Because I think a lot of times too, at least when we were in the Salesforce ecosystem, there were certainly clients who were using Marketing Cloud for marketing and transactional, but sometimes they would have a SendGrid or something like that on the side, or an Amazon SES, that was running their transactional messaging or their operational messaging. And most of the customers that we work with have marketing, operational, and transactional all on Braze. 

Well, I know over the last few years, we have worked with a good number of brands that have a franchise model or they may have their marketing teams, you know, not in one centralized group. It’s very decentralized, so you end up having a lot of groups leveraging Braze and how does that translate from Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Braze? 

I feel like I’m a boxer, like I could go fight right now because I’m so — I love this question because Braze does it so much better than Marketing Cloud does.

I think that’s one of the things that people are most surprised by, is that everyone in Marketing Cloud is used to business units and how that data, the content, everything is kind of siphoned off between these different elements. Um, Braze has that capability. They’re just called workspaces. So you can have essentially different instances of Braze.

But what’s even so much better about Braze is that the permissions, and the user sets are so much more advanced and detailed than Marketing Cloud is. We have a lot of clients who have separate workspaces or separate business units like the Marketing Cloud model, but we also all have a lot of clients who run either, like a global model that has multiple regions or they have multiple brands underneath their portfolio or franchises, but they’ll actually function from one workspace because at a user level, I can determine exactly what data I’m allowed to see, exactly what campaigns, what content.

So if I log in versus if Michael logs in versus if Bri logs in, the experience is completely different. It might seem like different workspaces, but it’s actually all one, which provides a lot of benefits as well, especially if you’re an admin or if you’re an overarching marketing leader, you can see everything from inside of one workspace instead of having it distributed.

A question we get all the time — migration timeline, especially if we’re thinking about a global organization. 

Yeah,  I’m going to give the consultant answer. It always, always depends. But I would say most migrations from our standpoint, take between five and 12 months. Obviously completely dependent upon where your data is.

I think the one area to be considerate of is that for those of you who have been on Salesforce Marketing Cloud for a while, before data warehouses became so commonplace, a lot of us just created Salesforce Marketing Cloud as our own marketing data warehouse. And so if you’re thinking about a migration, the longest tail in that timeline is making sure that all of the data that’s in Marketing Cloud now lives somewhere else.

So we either have to migrate that over to Braze, we have to migrate that to Snowflake or Databricks or whatever data warehouse you’re using. So those are some of the key things to keep in mind. The migrating of campaigns, IP warming, all those things are fairly straightforward at this point.

Most of us, I think, have gone through a migration before, so the data is really the biggest part and where we see the longest tail in that timeline. 

This is a question we get all the time. Like, then what should the data team be doing now? Like, even well before executing on a migration.

Yeah. So this is another great thing about Marketing Cloud’s API, is, what we would recommend that you do is pull down every single triggered send, user-initiated send, or journey that you have inside of Marketing Cloud, identify the data extension that’s being used for sending, and catalog all of the fields inside of that data extension, and figure out if that data lives inside the data warehouse already or if we need to go through a process of bringing that data down.

Which pulling that data out is not difficult, right? That’s through… You know, we can do that through an extract inside of an Automation Studio job. We can pull that down through the API. But it’s really, like, the documenting of what’s there first. So that’s where I would start. If you kind of know you’re going to go down this path, even if you’re not exactly sure when it’s going to be, start having your data team help you analyze what’s in Marketing Cloud now, so that way you can do that gap analysis and move forward quickly.

So from Clark, Michael you have an hour with Marc Benioff to advise him on the future of Salesforce Marketing Cloud. What would you tell him about the combination of Braze and Salesforce? That’s a bit of a softball there. I think… We have a very strong opinion about this.

We’ve been saying this for years. We’ve got our roots in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, a long history. I forgot even when Salesforce Marketing Cloud was launched. Was it 2000? It might be like 25, 26 years ago. And I think it had a great run, and I think whoever was advising Marc and team, I think advised the right way, which was, you gotta go make another bet, and that bet is clearly Braze.

So I appreciate everyone’s time. We’ll make sure to follow up with you all, uh, with an email of the recording, and we’re happy to go into deeper conversations about what your current instance looks like. What are you thinking about renewal? We’re happy to help in any way we can. Just really appreciate the time. 

Thanks, everybody. 

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