Demand Gen Report

Industry observers speculate that Salesforce.com is taking a more adversarial stance toward some competing marketing automation vendors in the wake of its announced plans to acquire ExactTarget. Marketo was slated to have a booth and a speaking slot at a Salesforce customer event last week in New York, but they did not have a presence. Silverpop was the only marketing automation vendor to have a booth at the event.

Sources told Demand Gen Report that Marketo was excluded from the event because of a conflict over some recent unspecified comments made by Marketo officials, but the friction has been resolved. Marketo is expected to be involved in a Toronto event this Wednesday, according to Salesforce officials.

Marketo and Eloqua are no longer listed on the SFDC AppExchange, although HubSpot remains on the exchange.

Just a week after spending $2.5 billion on ExactTarget, Salesforce has acquired business intelligence and analytics startup EdgeSpring. The details of the deal were not disclosed.

"Business intelligence and analytics in the enterprise is massively painful and IMHO still largely an unsolved problem today," Vijay Chakravarthy, EdgeSpring CEO, posted on the company's web site. “Being a part of Salesforce.com will give us a tremendous opportunity to take our technology to the next level and deliver truly amazing innovation to solve this high value problem.”

BrightEdge, a content marketing platform vendor, has closed $42.8 million in Series D funding, led by Insight Venture Partners. Insight Venture Partners joins existing investors Intel Capital, Battery Ventures, Altos Ventures and Illuminate Ventures.

Jim Yu, Founder and CEO of BrightEdge, told Demand Gen Report that the additional funding will go toward research and development, global expansion and adding to the sales and client services teams. He noted that BrightEdge posted a 200% return on capital in revenue run rate in FY2012 and added 300 clients in the past year, among other achievements.

Marketo announced the availability of the Marketo Customer Engagement engine, which company officials say will simplify the process of developing targeted campaigns by intelligently and automatically managing the timing and distribution of content.

Features include:

Will Salesforce.com’s acquisition of ExactTarget fuel interest in marketing automation, or does it mean that the marketing automation function is going to get gobbled up by CRMs, the way Oracle swallowed Eloqua? While it is still early in the game, most experts who spoke with Demand Gen Report said the ExactTarget deal was a positive move for the marketing automation space. However, independent vendors will have to address other marketing functions such as budgeting, content planning and financial applications to remain viable in the long term.

“It is a brilliant move for [Salesforce.com] that gives entry into B2C markets, addresses a critical functional weakness in their own system, and gives them Pardot marketing automation for free,” said David M. Raab, Principal, Raab Associates. “Marketing automation sits right between email and CRM, so once you control those two, then marketing automation pretty much comes along for the ride. But I don’t think SFDC will shut out competitors, so it’s not an immediate death sentence for independent marketing automation vendors.”