Dentsu Group Inc. (Tokyo: 4324; ISIN: JP3551520004; President & CEO: Hiroshi Igarashi; Head Office: Tokyo; Capital: 74,609.81 million yen) announced today that it has entered an agreement to acquire a majority stake in Extentia, a global technology and services firm with a focus on enterprise mobility, cloud engineering, and user experiences. Extentia will join Merkle, a leading technology-enabled, data-driven customer experience management (CXM) company within Dentsu Group’s international business, Dentsu International.

Established in 1998, Extentia has nearly 800 staff in Pune and Bangalore, India. With this acquisition, Extentia further bolsters Merkle’s existing Salesforce capabilities, adding scale and additional geography in India. As a Salesforce Crest Partner and one of the nine Salesforce product development outsourcers globally, Extentia adds expertise with more than 350 Salesforce certifications and new Salesforce App Cloud capabilities. The union will further expand Merkle’s existing offering in Salesforce Sales and Service Cloud capabilities.

Dentsu Group has more than 1,300 Salesforce trained staff and 3,500 Salesforce certifications, providing customer experience transformation solutions that are aligned with Salesforce Cloud capabilities. Merkle’s Salesforce offering is underpinned by its longstanding expertise in outcome-led customer experience, driven by data and enabled by marketing technology, cementing its unique positioning in the Salesforce ecosystem.

The acquisition demonstrates Dentsu Group’s commitment to enabling clients to deliver best-in-class differentiated and connected experiences across the entire customer journey. It aligns with Dentsu Group’s stated ambition of reaching 50% of net revenue generated by Customer Transformation & Technology (CT&T)*, encompassing the fast growth areas of customer experience and commerce.

“As one of Salesforce’s largest partners and its top agency partner, we owe it to our customers to deliver world-class, cross-functional, cross-platform expertise,” said Michael Komasinski, global CEO, Merkle. “Extentia differentiates itself through a design-first approach to its cloud-native technical and engineering product solutions, This strategic acquisition will allow Merkle and dentsu to meet the growing market demand for support our clients in driving complex architecture integrations.”

“We’re incredibly excited about this next phase of Extentia’s journey. We’ve found a perfect partner in Merkle – complementing our respective strengths, scaling our digital capabilities, and delivering positive value for all our stakeholders,” said Umeed Kothavala, CEO at Extentia.  “Building on our capabilities across digital transformation, experience-centricity, and cloud platforms, Extentia and Merkle will deliver advanced solutions to more customers across the world than ever before. As a member of the growing Merkle family, we look forward to shared opportunities, limitless synergies, and collaborating on a shared vision of the future.”

Extentia employees, including the leadership team, will make the transition to Merkle. The company will be known as “Extentia, a Merkle Company” with immediate effect and will develop joint go-to-market plans and accelerate growth across both businesses.