Oracle Buys Eloqua: Winners and Losers for B2B Marketing Automation

Oracle announced today that it has agreed to purchase B2B marketing automation leader Eloqua for $23.50 per share, which comes to $871 million. This was a bit of a surprise, given that Eloqua just went public in August. The stock had been hovering around $17.50 recently, so $23.50 is a 34% premium: reasonable but not exciting. It suggests that neither Oracle nor Eloqua management felt the company was substantially undervalued.The deal makes obvious...

Read More

Future of Marketing Automation: Grow or Die

‘Tis the season for industry predictions. I’ve already fielded a couple of requests for my thoughts, which usually requires some pondering before I reply. But this time I was able to answer right away because I’ve just finished a white paper on the future of B2B marketing automation, sponsored by Leadformix and available here for free download.The question answered by the paper is “What will marketing automation vendors do next?” This is different...

Read More

Sitecore Migrates from Web Content Management to Cross-Channel Customer Engagement

It’s more than three years since my original post about Sitecore’s plans to transform itself from a Web content management system to a platform for cross-channel customer experience management. It seems to be working out – since that time, revenue has grown 40% per year and the number of clients has nearly doubled from 1,600 to 3,000. The company has attracted additional funding, added support for producing dynamic print content, launched an “App...

Read More

MindMatrix Adds Sales Support to Marketing Automation

One easily predictable trend in B2B marketing automation is that vendors will tailor their systems to specific industries. This is happening to some extent, but not as quickly as I had expected. The reason may be that B2B marketing automation products have a narrower scope than B2C systems, meaning there’s less advantage in creating vertical editions. For example, the data model of B2B systems is largely fixed, so industry-specific data models (a...

Read More

[x+1] Origin Digital Marketing Hub Offers Cross-Channel Decision Management

My recent posts on real time decision systems have all described products from vendors of batch-oriented, outbound campaign management systems. Expansion to real time decisions helps those vendors cement their strategic position as a complete solution for marketing departments. But technically the two sets of systems have little in common: outbound systems create lists for direct mail and email, while real time systems generate recommendations...

Read More

Pitney Bowes Interaction Optimizer and Dialogue Offer Unified Inbound/Outbound Marketing Campaigns

In his classic Harvard Business Review article Marketing Myopia, Theodore Levitt argued that railroad companies could have survived the rise of the automobile had they considered their business to be providing transportation, not running trains. Someone at Pitney Bowes clearly got the message.  The postal equipment giant has aggressively moved to become a provider of “customer communication technologies”, making 83 acquisitions costing $2.5...

Read More

A Framework for Real Time Decision Management: How SAS RTDM Fits In

I’ve had a couple of consulting projects recently that involve real-time decision systems (a.k.a. real time interaction managers), which are used to select the best treatment during a Web visit, telephone call, or other interaction.  This type of software has been around for two decades or more and repeatedly proven its value, but still has relatively few implementations.There are many possible reasons for the slow adoption.  Maybe marketers...

Read More

Marketing Lessons from Chernobyl

I’ll be speaking about optimization this Wednesday at the Online Marketing Summit conference in Santa Clara, CA. Since I’m very comfortable with the actual topic, most of my prep time has been spent looking for pictures for my slides.One discovery was the image above, which shows is how I think most people imagine optimization: a team of dead-serious revenue engineers carefully tweaking dials and watching gauges until they find the perfect balance...

Read More

Infor Epiphany Marketing and Interaction Advisor: Good Examples of B2C Marketing Automation

Epiphany was one of the high-fliers of an earlier marketing automation boom: launched in 1997 with an initial public offering in 1999, it traded stock for a full suite of marketing and CRM systems before its price collapsed. The remains were scooped up in 2005 by SSA Global, which was itself purchased in 2006 by enterprise software vendor Infor. Through all this, the company’s products continued to sell with little change. The crown jewel turned...

Read More

Microsoft Buys Marketing Automation Vendor MarketingPilot: Start of Something Big?

Microsoft today announced the acquisition of marketing management system vendor MarketingPilot, which will become part of its Dynamics CRM group. Financial terms were not disclosed.MarketingPilot is best described as integrated marketing management for mid-tier companies. It has a pretty low profile in the B2B marketing automation world, partly because it serves a mix of B2C and B2B clients but mostly because it started as a marketing operations...

Read More

ExactTarget Acquires Pardot: Great Exit for Pardot, Questionable Future for ExactTarget

ExactTarget announced its acquisition today of mid-tier marketing automation vendor Pardot, for just under $100 million ($95.5 million, to be exact). In one way, this was surprising: Pardot had seemed less interested in being purchased than others in the industry. But Pardot was also the only major marketing automation competitor without serious outside funding.  From that perspective it seems predictable that they would need access to more resources. Looking over the published materials and listening to the investor relations conference...

Read More

SetLogik Offers B2B Marketers a Real Marketing Database

I’ve now done more detailed research into the SetLogik B2B data management system I mentioned in my Dreamforce post.  If anything, I’m even more impressed.I originally saw SetLogik as a tool to associate marketing leads with sales opportunities, even when they are not connected directly within Salesforce.com. That’s important in itself, since those missing links are the greatest obstacle to showing the value of B2B marketing efforts through...

Read More

KXEN Packages Automated Predictive Models within Salesforce Apps

As I mentioned in my Marketing Automation Beer Goggles post, KXEN introduced a free lead scoring app  for Salesforce.com users at Dreamforce. KXEN has since given me a closer look at the lead scoring product, underlying technology, and future plans.First for details on Predictive Lead Scoring itself. As originally reported, it’s free and requires no configuration to set up. The trade-off for this simplicity is users have no control over which...

Read More

Three Ways to Dominate the Marketing Automation Industry

I wrote last August that it’s still possible for new B2B marketing automation vendors to challenge the industry leaders. This was based on the observation that several of the smaller vendors have quickly reached the 1,000 client benchmark. But it didn’t answer the more interesting question of what it would take for a new vendor to really bypass the current leaders.That particular question came up repeatedly during Dreamforce last week. The answer...

Read More