Sun still shining as Adobe’s Marketing cloud just gets bigger

Over the past few years data has become ‘the’ word within pretty much all aspects of business but in Marketing terms it is now the key to success. Understanding your data means understanding your clients and with technologies allowing us more and more insight into customer and human behaviour the stats are hard to ignore.

Merging, bidding and buying has been going on to become the ‘all purpose’ data marketing compendium and now the latest acquisition to go through is Adobe Systems, maker of graphic-design software, purchasing the French digital-marketing company Neolane for an impressive $600 million in cash.

Neolane tools help marketers reach customers through bespoke campaigns using channels such as the Internet, e-mail, mobile devices and direct mail, will join Adobe’s Marketing Cloud product line.

It was only a matter of time before someone ‘snapped up’ Neolane and as Adobe’s competitors have recently been adding to their digital-marketing and cloud portfolios, it was expected. Last month saw Salesforce.com(CRM) buy ExactTarget for $2.5 billion. Oracle Corp. (ORCL) bought Eloqua Inc. for $871 million last year, and Teradata Corp. bought Aprimo in 2010 for $525 million, then merging it with the German email solution provider eCircle.

The competition is tough and the merges and acquisitions have played an interesting role on the job stage with people moving on or round to the next big data guy… So… who’s next… Will someone be after Responsys… ? emailvision…? Or a US wildcard of ConstantContact…?

We shall see….