The CRM Tech or MarTech market is growing and is therefore in motion.
Adobe is in a buying mood this year. It is Adobe’s biggest acquisition so far: 4.75 billion dollars is a lot of money for Marketo. As recently as mid-June, Adobe announced that in future Magento will belong to Adobe. The very high price shows:
How successful Marketo was or can be, because in Europe the company is only slowly starting to build up the business
How important the marketing cloud market is and will be for years to come.
Value increase from 1.9 to 4.75 billion dollars
The previous investor bought Marketo for 1.9 billion dollars. If the price is realized, this means more than a doubling of the value in barely two years. This means that last year’s MarTech keynote speaker Steve Lucas (CEO of Marketo) can sit back and relax. “Great Job”, say the Americans. As a reward, he must or may continue to work in the Adobe team. I’m sure I’ll hear what the industry thinks about it from Scott Brinker and others in Boston from October 1 to 3.
The deal is expected to become effective at the end of the next quarter or fiscal year of Adobe.
What makes Marketo so attractive?
“With nearly 5,000 customers, Marketo brings together planning, engagement and measurement capabilities into an integrated B2B marketing platform. Adding Marketo’s engagement platform to Adobe Experience Cloud will enable Adobe to offer an unrivaled set of solutions for delivering transformative customer experiences across industries and companies of all sizes.
For the future direction, Marketo is expected to expand in the B2B market (as before), while the Adobe Experience Cloud is expected to penetrate the B2C market even more.
Marketo sells through partners and they are part of the success. In this respect, Adobe can also have access to this sales network.
According to analysts’ opinions and our analyses and discussions (among others with Matt Zilli, CMO and TK management) Marketo is one of the top products in this market segment.
Here is a long video (1 h 30 min) showing Marketo at their Event Marketing Nation.
Our commentary on the deal and the CRM-Tech or MarTech market
5,000 customers is basically not a lot. The customers’ opinions are very good. And Marketo is not exactly one of the bargain providers right now. The company or its sales team knows what they are worth. Compared to other providers Marketo can do a lot, and that is included in the price. Openly Marketo does not talk about prices. So roughly from “900 dollars per month and user” the entry begins. What a package with appropriate equipment and number of licenses costs is to calculate.
Is this a merger or an additional purchase? So far it looks more like an additional purchase. This means that if Marketo can continue to work separately for the time being, they will certainly stay on the road to success. Especially as, as we heard at DMEXCO from Marketo, sales investments in Germany and Europe will increase. The partner network is still very thin in the D-A-CH market.
The entire market is currently in extreme motion. This can also be seen from the recent announcement by SAP (the new CRM version) and the connection to hybris Suite (Adobe was then a competitor of SAP for hybris). With the integration of SAP ERP, SAP could take advantage of this. Whether SAP will take advantage of this opportunity remains to be seen.
Microsoft, too, could soon come up with further acquisitions. The connection to AX and NAV with CRM and other Microsoft tools works, but not yet as well as users would like.
Salesforce is also buying and buying on top of that. Only Oracle has been hardly noticed in the CRM market lately. At DMEXCO we were quickly forwarded to the press department when we were asked “why? Last, but not least, as already reported, SugarCRM now belongs to a new investor.
Here is a video of the deal.
Conclusion
It remains exciting and it remains to be seen who may announce the next Big Bang. Rumors may be wafting across the hall in Boston.
If Marketo can build up the partner network in the D-A-CH region, then further growth is possible here. Only from experience we know that this is not easy. We know the lead times of some software vendors. They spend two to three years to gain 10 to 15 good partners and get them as an extended arm. Adobe and Marketo certainly have more money in their pockets than the companies we’ve been able to observe. But “a lot of money” has never been a guarantee of success. In this respect, the stormy young man at the top, Steve Lucas, is a possible success factor. Marketo is – as he says – the Customer Engagement Company. And he will have to use this – his – commitment in the D-A-CH region.
Note: This is a machine translation. It is neither 100% complete nor 100% correct. We can therefore not guarantee the result.
