by Scott Denne
ZoomInfo has picked up Komiko as business data providers look to expand into software to increase the value of their data. Suppliers of data about companies and their employees for use in B2B sales and marketing face pressure as marketers shift budget toward software. DiscoverOrg, ZoomInfo’s parent company, has already inked two deals since the start of the year to give it new ways to gather data, including its acquisition of ZoomInfo (subscribers to 451 Research‘s M&A KnowledgeBase can access our estimate of the purchase here).
Now, with Komiko, it’s looking to strengthen its position by integrating that data into the software ecosystem. Combining ZoomInfo’s contact data with Komiko’s ability to gather data from email and integrate it into CRM and other marketing apps could help ZoomInfo take a piece of its customers’ CRM budget, rather than just squaring off against other data providers. Although Komiko, which has just a handful of employees, was likely a small acquisition, it shows that data providers are looking to print more tech and software transactions.
At least one of DiscoverOrg’s competitors, Dun & Bradstreet, has gone well beyond integration and into building software with its recent reach for Lattice Engines (see our estimate here). Those deals come as B2B marketers are expanding their budgets for more advanced data applications, such as customer intelligence and data enrichment, at the expense of traditional tactics like lead scoring, according to a recent report from 451 Research‘s Voice of the Enterprise: Customer Experience and Commerce. That could have other data suppliers looking to buy software vendors, a development we explored in a recent report.
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