Recently industry observer Paul Shread noted that Teradata (News - Alert) and Salesforce.com did “a little last-minute Christmas shopping,” as the data warehousing and CRM vendors purchased a pair of cloud computing companies.
Teradata purchased Aprimo, a maker of Web-based integrated marketing software, for $535 million, according to Shread, who said “online CRM vendor Salesforce has acquired email contact management startup Etacts.” As Shread said, “Salesforce declined to reveal plans for the acquisition, which follows the company's acquisition of cloud Ruby developer company Heroku,” also in December.
Teradata will use Aprimo's cloud-based integrated marketing software to combine "powerful business analytics with integrated marketing solutions to enable corporations to improve and optimize marketing performance with data-driven insights,” Shread reported, saying Teradata officials described the Integrated Marketing Management (IMM) business as “emerging as a critical focus for businesses, representing one of the most strategic and largest areas of investment for most corporations."
TMC (News - Alert) also had the news that “the acquisition is expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2011. Aprimo products will continue to be marketed and sold under its own name once the acquisition closes. The takeover is expected to be slightly accretive to Teradata's non-GAAP earnings per share in the first year of closing.”
Teradata acquired DecisionPoint Software, a provider of integrated data solution for financial management in late 2005. Post-acquisition, DecisionPoint's products were integrated into Teradata's financial management solution and rebranded as Teradata Decision Expert.
TMC’s Anil Sharma noted recently [http://www.tmcnet.com/channels/crm-cloud-computing/articles/128838-salesforce-acquires-etacts.htm] that Etacts works as a plug-in for Google’s (News - Alert) Gmail and a web application, scans email messages and determines which contacts are the most important. It then reminds users to keep in touch with those people and to respond to email messages from them.
“However, the service stopped accepting new users not too long ago and will cease operations entirely within the next few weeks. The founders left a simple message on the Etacts homepage stating, ‘We have decided to pursue other opportunities and will be shutting down our service on January 31, 2011.’”
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.Edited by Juliana Kenny