IBM recently announced that it has entered an agreement to purchase Unica in a cash transaction worth approximately $480 million. The multiple IBM is paying for Unica is very encouraging (IBM is offering $21 a share to Unica shareholders, more than double the share’s closing price on Thursday last week, on the Nasdaq Stock market and the highest level the stock has ever seen). Post acquisition, Unica’s software unit will work with IBM’s business analytics and optimization consulting organization – a team of 5,000 consultants and a network of analytics solution centers. This is IBM’s 8th marketing and data related deal since 2008 – Cognos, iLog, Lombardi, Initiate, SPSS, Sterling Software, Coremetrics and Unica. IBM’s acquisition of Coremetrics, a leader in Web analytics software was just 2 weeks back and interestingly Coremetrics shares quite a few overlapping features with Unica. Suresh Vittal and Joe Stanhope from Forrester in a recent blog post on this acquisition commented, that Unica’s purchase reinforces IBM’s assertion that they are committing to marketing solutions and the CMO. They feel that this acquisition is more about Unica’s marketing automation and operations solutions than about the Web analytics products. IBM had mentioned earlier that Coremetrics will operate as a unit of IBM’s application and integration middleware division, essentially in Webspehere family of products as an analytics component. It seems IBM’s approach towards this space is to have its application server as the central piece powering all the key functionalities on the website, while it continues to control the ecosystem and protect the interests of its stakeholders.
Now let us look at Adobe, who just added Day Software in July this year along with their last year’s Omniture acquisition. The Omniture acquisition in 2009 made Adobe very strong on measurement of all engagement elements of the website – website itself, video, call to actions etc. With Day Software, Adobe adds Web content management (WCM), strong digital asset management (DAM) and social collaboration. So Adobe is moving in terms of making web authoring as central piece and continues to assemble components of the online customer engagement ecosystem. Now these are just 2 among handful of other big players moving into this space – ECM (Oracle/Stellent, Open Text/Vignette), marketing software (Alterian/MediaSurface) and enterprise search (Autonomy/Interwoven).
Overall large companies moving into the marketing technology landscape makes this space interesting in terms of predicting where the overlap of strategies and approaches will happen next.
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What is your aim in publishing this? As an insider I find it fascinating but I feel it would make anyone in a large organisation say “Oh, I’ll wait for IBM’s version” or “Oh, they’ll be doing it for Oracle soon”.
I was involved with Business Objects when they were taken over by SAP and Cognos too and in both cases it slowed the pace of development to a crawl, lost the business focus and stopped it being the player it once was.
These big companies have little understanding of marketing and a good niche player will beat them every time (until they get bought by them). I’m confident that Leadformix will continue to move at a pace which will make it hard for anyone to keep up, never mind IBM!
Hi Peter,
I guess the post is more about how the marketing technology space is getting hotter and more competitive.
With big players entering the scene the marketing automation industry is finally getting the attention it deserved.
However, agree with you, when you say many a times, smaller companies when acquired by bigger brands lose the focus.
At LeadFormix we are happy with these developments, because it brings the marketing software space into limelight. It is always more exciting to excel in a space with bigger challengers..
Hello. IBM is a giant so what it currently does is a giant move trying to buy Unica. It is a big step and i am looking forward to see the results. Thanks.