IBM to Acquire Silverpop, Adding Marketing Automation to Experience Portfolio

Today IBM announced it is acquiring marketing automation provider Silverpop for an undisclosed amount.

Not sure I would have saw this one coming, but it does seem the pattern that large customer experience vendors get their marketing automation needs via acquisition (think Adobe, Oracle and Salesforce here). It certainly makes sense to buy when there’s great technology available rather than go through what is likely years of effort to build from scratch (especially in a company like IBM).

Next to Marketo, Silverpop was one of the last big marketing automation vendors, offering a SaaS based service to some pretty big name companies.

“By engineering a solution that uniquely delivers personalization through automation, our team has solved one of the most complex challenges facing marketers today,” said Bill Nussey, CEO, Silverpop. “Combined with the power of IBM’s portfolio and worldwide partner ecosystem, we can advance our mission to help organizations build customer relationships one at a time on an even grander scale.”

Silverpop will be added to IBM’s Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) portfolio providing cloud-based B2B offerings for lead to revenue management, real-time email marketing, behavioural marketing and more (including B2C marketing automation). I also think Silverpop’s e-commerce specific marketing automation solutions are a big sell for IBM and its SmarterCommerce platform.

Maybe the biggest question that arises out of this new marketing automation acquisition is whether there is a need for a standalone marketing automation platform, or if the only way to deliver true omni-channel experiences is through a single tightly integrated platform. What do you think?

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