Contact: Scott Denne Matt Mullen
In its first deal as a publicly traded company, Marketo spends $19.5m to pick up Insightera, a website automation vendor that deepens its portfolio of marketing automation offerings and gives it technology that its larger competitors don’t yet have.
Marketo is shelling out about $6m in cash, with the remainder in stock, for Insightera, an early-stage company that raised $6.5m in series A funding last summer. The target’s technology enables customers to personalize the content of their websites for each visitor – a technology that many startups, including Demandbase, Dynamic Yield and Causata (acquired by NICE Systems in August), are developing while other large marketing software providers stick to email and social for their automation offerings.
While Marketo faces intense competition in the wake of consolidation in this market, its focus on selling straight to CMOs is an advantage. The acquisition of Insightera provides another product that directly serves that audience. While salesforce.com became a major competitor with its purchase of ExactTarget, it’s approaching marketing software as an extension of CRM. Likewise, Oracle sees marketing as part of a bundle to be sold to CIOs, rather than a stand-alone marketing sale.
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