I feel comforted to read that I was not the only person who assumed Marketo would be acquired by Microsoft or SAP!
The prolific martech acquirer, Vista Equity Partners, has also snapped up an event management platform, Cvent and automative focused software provider, Solera.
This trio is a powerful combination of technologies for any enterprise organisation to harness. Whilst Solera focuses on automotive their CRM system could also compliment Marketo as a native offering. A quick review of clients for each company also indicates a diverse range that will be beneficial to Marketo, Solera or Cvent.
To gain real competitive advantage Marketo's new owners would be wise to build CRM functionality within the current tool to further compete with Salesforce, IBM and Oracle.
Marketo, the marketing software giant that went public in 2013, is being taken private again: PE firm Vista Equity Partners has acquired the company for $1.79 billion in an all-cash deal. The news ends weeks of speculation in which people guessed that Marketo would be snapped up potentially by strategics like Microsoft (who is a big partner of Marketo) or SAP. In the end, it’s a PE firm, thereby meaning that neither of these two enterprise IT giants will be using an acquisition of the company to make a more definitive move into the marketing sphere to compete against Adobe, Oracle and others.