Big fish eats small fish
IBM announcedthat they will acquire Silverpop, a provider of marketing automation and email marketing software, to “help marketers deliver personalized customer engagements”. Bill Nussey, CEO at Silverpop, shares his thoughts around the acquisition.
Silverpop has been a one of the bigger fishes in the marketing automation ocean. During the past years the company has made several of interesting and important acquisitions that has positioned them as a key player in the market. Now they are part of a bigger company, which gives them both new opportunities and new challenges. .
Silverpop acqusitions 2002-2012:
2002 – Epigraphx LLC, CA, USA
2003 - Avalon., CA, USA
2005 - Digital Oxygen, London, UK
2007 – Vtrenz
2011 - PlacePunch
2012 - CoreMotives
What about SAP?
I don’t know what the next step will be, but I would be surprised if SAP doesn’t acquire one of the available L2RM Platform on the market. In the Forrester report "L2RM Platform Vendors: For Large Enterprises, Q1 2014, there aren't that many vendors left to acquire.
One of the available vendors are Adobe, which recently strengthen their relationship with SAP when they announched the global reseller agreement. After the agreement I wrote the blog post SAP is getting ready to meet Gartner’s prediction ”By 2017 the CMO will Spend More on IT Than the CIO".
Many people has been very excited about the announcement, particularly Jonathan Becher, the CMO at SAP. Read his blog post:My Thoughts on Adobe and SAP Teaming Up to Deliver Insight-Driven Marketing and Commerce