Tag Archives: Marketing Technology

First Look: Marketo’s Customer Engagement Engine

Today, Marketo announced the availability of the Marketo Customer Engagement engine, a new marketing automation platform (MAP) capability that focuses on simplifying the design, execution and reporting of nurture programs. The Customer Engagement engine is composed of four key capabilities: Smart Streams, content restriction, communication limits and Engagement Score. We have described each of these capabilities below, and for each have noted our comments.

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Salesforce.com’s Acquisition of ExactTarget: What It Means to the MAP Market

What a difference several quarters can make, especially in the marketing automation space. Silverpop has acquired CoreMotives, Manticore Technology has merged with Sales Engine International, Aprimo has acquired eCircle, Eloqua filed an initial public offering and then was acquired by Oracle, LoopFuse has merged with Nearstream, ExactTarget has acquired Pardot, and now, Salesforce.com has acquired ExactTarget. In my last post, I focused on why Salesforce.com acquired ExactTarget and how its motives go beyond simply getting into the marketing automation platform (MAP) market. In this post, I will look at how Salesforce.com’s acquisition of Pardot (via the ExactTarget acquisition) impacts the MAP market as a whole, as well as how it will change Salesforce.com’s relationship with Eloqua.

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Salesforce.com’s Acquisition: Why ExactTarget?

In our earlier analysis of Salesforce.com’s acquisition of ExactTarget, Jonathan Block discussed what the acquisition means for the marketing automation platform (MAP) market. Here are my additional thoughts on why Salesforce.com acquired ExactTarget. As Jonathan noted, no crystal ball was needed to predict that Salesforce.com would purchase (or build) a MAP at some point. The question then becomes, why did Salesforce.com choose ExactTarget as an acquisition target – and why did it do so now?

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Salesforce.com Buys ExactTarget

That sound you just heard was the collective sigh of all the marketing automation technology vendors that had hoped Salesforce.com would acquire them. Instead, today Salesforce.com announced its purchase of technology vendor ExactTarget for approximately $2.5 billion. Under the terms of the agreement, Salesforce.com will buy all outstanding shares of ExactTarget for $33.75 per share. No crystal ball was needed to predict that Salesforce.com would purchase a marketing automation vendor at some point. While the company played the role of vendor-agnostic, supporting a number of marketing automation solutions through its AppExchange, all bets were off once rival Oracle purchased marketing automation platform vendor Eloqua in December 2012.

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Marketing and IT: A Lovefest?

I attended the Marketing Operations Cross Company Alliance (MOCCA) Executive Forum last week in San Francisco. For those of you who are not familiar with this group, it is composed of people in marketing operations leadership roles, primarily in b-to-b companies. True to its Silicon Valley roots, members mostly come from technology companies, although MOCCA’s ranks are growing with companies from other industries. There are two chapters, one based on the West Coast and one in Washington, D.C. We held an interesting Oxford-style debate on the topic of whether the “ownership” of marketing technology should be with IT or the marketing organization. One side took the position that marketing should be the absolute ruler of its technology and IT should butt out, and the opposing position was that IT was far better staffed and equipped to plan, procure and manage technology than marketing.

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Oracle Buys Eloqua, Part 2

Earlier today, Jonathan Block discussed here what Oracle’s acquisition of Eloqua means for Eloqua and the MAP market as a whole. I agree with the points Jonathan raised, especially his opinion on Oracle’s poor track record of capitalizing on the marketing technologies it acquires and on what this acquisition might signal for Salesforce.com. Here are my additional thoughts on the roadmap, competitive positioning, lifecycle marketing and Eloqua employees.

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Oracle Buys Eloqua

On December 20, 2012, Oracle announced its intent to purchase marketing automation platform (MAP) provider Eloqua for $871 million, a 31 percent premium over the Eloqua share price on the day of the announcement. The deal should be completed in the first half of 2013. Oracle is sending out a “business as usual” message to outline its plans regarding the acquisition, at least in the short term.

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Microsoft Acquires MarketingPilot

Microsoft has announced the acquisition of MarketingPilot to bolster its Microsoft Dynamics CRM business. This is the second marketing software acquisition in a week (ExactTarget acquired Pardot on October 11 for $95.5 million), putting an exclamation point on the importance of marketing technology solutions. This acquisition also signals Microsoft’s intention to do more in the rapidly growing market for marketing applications.

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Determining Whether to Automate Marketing Processes

B-to-b marketers, who've become more comfortable with procurement, implementation and use of automation technology, are increasingly interested in implementing tools that optimize processes and enable new marketing operations efficiencies. Many are identifying processes that are candidates for optimization and deciding whether marketing resource management (MRM) applications would be a good choice to improve operational performance. Here are three perspectives.

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CMOs See New and Changing B-to-B Marketing Roles

Earlier this year SiriusDecisions tapped into its CMO and marketing leader network for a snapshot of the b-to-b marketing roles they had either created or eliminated in the past year. Social media, customer marketing and marketing technology were the newly created roles cited most often.

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