2013 has been an interesting year. First, in June we saw Salesforce.com acquire ExactTarget for $2.5 billion, SFDC Presser . This deal was a big one that saw the coming together of the preeminent CRM SaaS solution with the leading ESP that had started its growth trajectory by catering to the SMB market. ExactTarget took the leadership position by out maneuvering its competition by investing significant money from two rounds of $70,000,000 each into sales and marketing. As any salesperson in the email marketing space wehn asked whom they are competing against in every deal, and they'll surely tell you ExactTarget .
In the traditional enterprise ESP space, Responsys similarly took a leadership position many years ago by focusing on retail and sizable database clients. They too invested heavily in sales and marketing and did well with the analysts. They lacked the direct integation with CRM and database suites. That all changed on December 20th when Oracle announced they had acquired Responsys for $1.5 billion.
It's not hard to see what's happening here. $4 billion has been spent on ESP's in the last 6 months by CRM and database driven companies, as they look to add deployment engines to their solutions. Effectively, we're seeing the second wave of this as the marketing and omnichannel digital elements are being combined. Between 2004 and 2009 we saw companies like Bigfoot Interactive, CheetahMail and Digital Impact get acquired by Epsilon, Experian and Acxiom as those data driven companies added email to their other services.
The goal is simple. Can any of these companies combine a tool set that will enable their customers who use them for first party data housing and campaign management, effectively? Is this the right strategy? As Oracle and Salesforce.com fight to own the data and keep the delivery mechanisms in place who else will join the game? IBM has their own ESP tool but can't sit by and watch Oracle and Salesforce acquire top tier ESP's and do nothing, can they? Teradata? And what will Epsilon, Experian and Acxiom do to respond to this challenge?
One thing that is constant, is that there will be change. First party data is the prize and as Newman once famously said on Seinfield, "When you control the mail, you control information."
Follow us on Twitter
And visit us at www.etaconsults.com