Posted by Jonathan Block on Fri, Aug 13, 2010 @ 08:13 AM
IBM has announced that it has entered an agreement to purchase Unica in a cash transaction worth approximately $480 million. As followers of SiriusDecisions are aware, we've been predicting the consolidation of the marketing automation platform (MAP) space for some time. While other acquisitions have occurred, albeit it on a smaller scale (even taking into account Oracle's purchase of Market2Lead's IP), this could be the tipping point we've been predicting. It's easy to overstate the potential for consolidation, given the relatively small size of the MAP market, but other vendors have certainly been shopping themselves and have most likely been pricing themselves out of consideration.
So what of this acquisition? IBM has been using Unica internally, and standardized on it as their MAP worldwide in 2009. While the timeline to complete such an enterprise implementation is long, IBM clearly saw the value of Unica's capabilities and the opportunity to enter the marketing automation game. In addition to its marketing automation solution, Unica is one of the leaders of what we call Marketing Operations Management (others call it MRM), which handles planning, budgeting, scheduling, asset management, and a host of other operations capabilities. Unica also has a Web analytics product, but IBM already has solutions in this area. According to IBM, it's the operations and MAP functionality they were after to bolster its own ability to offer an automated, cross-channel marketing solution along with key marketing process and operations capabilities.
This acquisition is positive and gives MAP customers a strong choice; it remains to be seen whether this is an enterprise choice only or if it will be palatable to smaller customers as well. The implementation portion of adopting a MAP (whether on-demand or not) is something few marketing organizations have the stomach for. Given that the MAP market consists of relatively small vendors, who have had to rely increasingly on their emerging partner networks as the pace of clients they need to install has outpaced their internal resources capabilities, the combination of Unica/IBM technology along with IBM's vast services groups could help accelerate MAP adoption, certainly for larger organizations. So will this acquisition start a domino effect? Most likely, but the row of dominoes is fairly short. The real question is will those seeking to acquire a similar vendor buy one that offers the full complement of operations, analytics and MAP capabilities (such as Aprimo or Neolane) or one that focuses on the MAP side (such as Eloqua, Marketo, Silverpop or Manticore Technology)?
Posted by Jonathan Block on Wed, May 26, 2010 @ 08:58 AM
Oracle announced this week that it has purchased the intellectual property assets of marketing automation platform (MAP) vendor Market2Lead.
We've been predicting the consolidation of the MAP market for a number of years and, after the 2007 acquisition of Vtrenz by Silverpop, expected there would have been more closer to that time. On the other hand, even with growth in the market, none of the MAP vendors has yet reached high enough annual revenue to entice a major buying spree. Due to that, we're not sure the Oracle acquisition will be enough to bring the other CRM players (such as Salesforce or Microsoft) to the buying table in the immediate term. In the longer term, however, we fully expect most of the current players we consider a MAP to be acquired eventually.
A few market signs suggest that Market2Lead has been on the market for a while. For example, the list of customer shown on their website remained unchanged for well over a year. In addition, while we believe their marketing efforts often appeared inconsistent, from our viewpoint they've also been out of the collective MAP buyer's consciousness. It's been some time since we since we heard form a client who told us they were seriously evaluating Market2Lead.
But having said that, we've always been very positive in regard to Market2Lead's technology. On the data management side, they're particularly strong. We believe Oracle made a wise decision in buying the technology, not only because of its strength in data management, but also because it will help elevate Oracle's own marketing offerings. Finally, and importantly, Oracle states that it plans to integrate the Market2Lead technology into its CRM products. This is good news for marketers: Siebel Marketing has been a weaker offering for B2B marketers compared to functionality in competing products, but it is the mandated marketing automation tool for many companies. This move is great news for those marketing teams.
Posted by Joe Galvin on Tue, Apr 27, 2010 @ 10:46 AM
When Salesforce.com (SFDC) announced its intention to acquire Jigsaw on April 21, 2010, it marked its entrance into the data services market. Jigsaw’s SaaS-based, crowdsourcing model of company/contact data collection and validation appears to be a logical extension of SFDC’s cloud computing infrastructure. What is unclear is if SFDC really wants to compete with the D&Bs, Hoovers and ZoomInfo’s of the world for this market or if this, like their other acquisitions, becomes the technology foundation for their next cloud-based application. Just as Korel turned into SFDC content and Groupswim became Chatter, does Jigsaw become SFDC Contact at some point in the future attempting to leverage the millions of contacts currently stored in SFDC by their multitude of clients? I struggle to believe that the SFDC sales force is going to make plan by selling Jigsaw as an add-on into their client base as they attempted with SFDC Content before making it free. Or that they will direct/distract their sales force into the complex marketing data buying centers where vendors like Harte-Hanks and Acxiom make a living.
Does this also ignite the dreams of all those App-Exchange vendors that they may be next? Does this signal SFDC’s intention to get serious about marketing automation? At DreamForce last November, many thought the “mystery cloud” that later revealed itself to be Chatter was going to be the announcement of an acquisition in the marketing automation platform (MAP) space, as had been rumored. SFDC’s marketing capabilities are notoriously lacking when compared to the functionality we see with MAPs like Eloqua, Marketo and Manticore Technology. Combining the data services capabilities of Jigsaw with an established MAP vendor would give their sales force a powerful 1-2 punch to sell add-on seats into marketing, leveraging their SFA infrastructure and growing their contact value.
The increasing volume of announced and soon-to-be-announced vendor acquisitions/mergers in the sales and marketing automation markets suggest that in anticipation of the next growth cycle, the vendor community is quickly adapting to user demand for value-added applications that drive performance and sales productivity, and that these are the requirements that will rise to the forefront of funded initiatives. With more than 88 percent of organizations having already deployed core sales force accounting (SFA) applications, it seems only logical that the next wave of user investment will be directed toward sales and marketing 2.0 applications — those that focus on selling, not just measuring sales.
For SFDC users this can only be viewed as good news. Jigsaw, like Content and Chatter, represents the first truly new functionality we’ve seen from SFDC, enabling it to move beyond being a sales force accounting tool and becoming the integrated sales and marketing suite that users are building for themselves today.
Posted by Jonathan Block on Wed, Jan 20, 2010 @ 09:22 AM
Social media monitoring is a popular topic these day, and deservedly so. From our perspective monitoring is one of the four cornerstones of an effective social media strategy, which consists of Monitoring, Engagement, Awareness and Demand Creation. But where vendor functionality regularly outpaced a B2B organization's skills and process capabilities, users are finding such monitoring tools lacking in some key areas. This is not unlike the the marketing automation platforms (MAP) space; it's only in the last couple of years that B2B marketers have evolved to the point where they can take full advantage of MAP capabilities.
Let's look at what we're hearing from clients on two fronts:
- Integration: Again, not unlike MAPs, ease of integration of social monitoring platforms with other enterprise systems will become a differentiator for many customers. And we mean true integration, not just importing and exporting data. If you're only interested in tracking mentions, keywords and sentiment, as well as some indication of your level of engagement, then a standalone monitoring tool will be sufficient. But most B2B organizations look beyond communication goals to social media marketing, which requires tracking all customer and prospect interactions (what we call "following the social media breadcrumbs"), and integrating this data into MAP and CRM systems is critical. This explains why social tools are finding their way into such systems, either through partnering, acquisition, or the vendors building such functionality themselves.
- From reporting to analytics: Most clients tell us that social media monitoring platforms are good at reporting what people are talking about, where they're doing that talking, and offering some indication of sentiment, but many B2B marketers are disappointed at the lack of analysis they get. To be fair, agencies are still a significant user base of monitoring tools and many provide this analysis as a value-add to their customers, but more and more marketers are interested in leveraging these tools themselves. If monitoring solutions don't provide the analysis customers need, they'll need to integrate with systems that can such as a web analytics or business intelligence solution.
Social media monitoring is a still a relatively new market and growing pains are to be expected. While some users complain about usability issues (whither the concept of robust online help?), B2B organizations realize they must continue to evolve from a skills and process perspective to best take advantage of social monitoring tools. But these solutions also need to evolve from data aggregation to a solution for insight and action, providing not just activity information (read: who, what and where) but some indication of the impact these activities.
How would you like to see social media monitoring evolve?