Dive Brief:
- Marketo is one of the last major independent marketing automation vendors, but that might be changing soon as Marketing Land reports the firm is exploring strategic options that include selling to a tech giant such as SAP, Microsoft or Adobe.
- At its user conference last week, CEO Phil Fernandez also announced a new tech investment called Project Orion intended to address the Internet of Things (IoT).
- Fernandez said the new technology will put “every customer interaction in the context of what came before and what comes next so that companies can listen, learn and respond to each customer in a personalized, relevant and contextual way everywhere they are.”
Dive Insight:
Rumors of an acquisition began to swirl when Bloomberg reported that Marketo was in talks with Morgan Stanley on a possible sale. And the martech space – after seeing the likes of Eloqua, Silverpop, ExactTarget and others get snapped up by Oracle, IBM and Salesforce – is still ripe for M&A activity.
According to Marketing Land, Marketo’s tech is moving toward personalized content throughout the sales funnel with account-based marketing being increasingly integrated with sales tools as well as an email channel in the platform’s predictive content application. The current platform is more focused on predictive content for website visitors.
"The old paradigm of channels goes out the window," because so many devices will be sending first-party data to martech platforms, CMO Sanjay Dholakia recently said regarding the IoT element in the latest version of Marketo's platform.
As the company continues to build out its tech offerings, Marketo being a hold-out in the martech sector is a bit surprising given the company's CEO's history of building and selling tech companies.