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Adobe today announced plans to acquire Neolane, the largest remaining independent B2C marketing automation vendor (excluding email-focused providers like Responsys and Silverpop). Price was $600 million, which is roughly in line with the 8x revenue paid for ExactTarget and Eloqua recently. (Neolane announced $58 million revenue in 2012 and has been growing around 40% per year, which would yield about $80 million 2013 revenue.)
Neolane is more of a mid-tier solution than an enterprise product, which may be a slight mismatch with Adobe. I’d say that reflects a lack of enterprise systems available for Adobe to purchase, more than any particular desire to target the mid-market.
Predictable or not, this deal does fill a gaping hole in Adobe’s marketing cloud. It still doesn’t put Adobe on equal footing with Oracle, Salesforce, SAP or Microsoft, since they all have major CRM platforms which Adobe does not. Adobe obviously has a leadership position in content creation, although I’ve never felt that does much good in selling customer management systems.
Saw this while on vacation last week, and given the role Neolane plays in the B2B space (small), I thought to hold off on scooping this for you. Not a major move for the B2B marketers, but news nevertheless.
But with the consolidation, I wouldn't be surprised if marketing automation goes away as a term/market segment. Time to consider changing the title of this blog.