IBM (News - Alert) has announced a definitive agreement to acquire Atlanta, GA. based Silverpop, a privately held software company.
“The acquisition of Silverpop (News - Alert) turbocharges IBM’s ability to put the customer at the center of any organization,” said Craig Hayman, general manager for industry cloud solutions at IBM.
Hayman believes that now, nearly any marketing, commerce or customer service professional, from any business, will have the ability to deliver the kinds of personalized customer experiences that make a measurable impact on the brand experience and the bottom line.
With this acquisition, IBM plans to accelerate its leadership in marketing automation. According to Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert)'s Global Marketing Automation Software Market research, the global marketing automation software revenue is expected to reach $1.9 billion by 2020.
It is expected that the combination of IBM’s enterprise marketing portfolio and Silverpop’s marketing automation and real-time personalization technology will create a complete and advanced customer engagement solution for businesses of all kinds.
“Combined with the power of IBM’s portfolio and worldwide partner ecosystem, we can advance our mission to help organizations build customer relationships one at a time on an even grander scale,” said Bill Nussey, CEO at Silverpop.
Silverpop’s client list includes companies such as Mazda, Stonyfield Farm and Advanced Micro Devices (News - Alert). These companies can now harness the benefits of IBM’s platform. Meanwhile, Silverpop extends IBM’s client base to power the marketing capabilities of 8,000 organizations in over 50 countries around the world.
It is also expected that this latest acquisition will enable IBM to tap Silverpop’s ability to empower marketers with easy-to-use cloud-based capabilities that can be deployed, with little technical knowledge, to adapt to changing customer demands.
According to company officials, IBM’s growing ecosystem, consisting of over 140 Ready for Smarter Commerce marketing partners, will create a complete view of each customer by integrating data from the additional sources into Silverpop. This will offer the advantage of deeper customization.
IBM did not disclose the financial terms of the deal. The company expects to close this acquisition deal in the second quarter of 2014.
Edited by Maurice Nagle