B2B companies are increasingly adopting e-Commerce as a means of marketing and selling their products and services, according to a BtoB Magazine report titled: “The Emerging Role of B-to-B E-commerce.” The online survey was sponsored by SAP’s Ariba, Inc. and conducted in March and April with more than 220 marketers. According to Forrester Research, B2B e-Commerce transactions within the U.S. exceed $550 billion annually.

More than 30% of B2B marketers are “strong” or “complete” adopters of e-Commerce, in comparison to the 25% from last year. With only 15% of marketers currently avoiding e-Commerce entirely, BtoB predicts that by 2014 40% of B2B marketers expect to be as committed to e-Commerce as a means of marketing and selling.

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.”

Extraprise’s lead nurturing campaign was named finalist for the 2013 Stevie Award for Business-to-Business Marketing Campaign of the Year — Business Services and Diversified Services.

The revenue optimization solution provider was nominated for its continuous lead nurturing program.

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:

Marketers are quick to discard duplicate leads to avoid doubling their demand generation efforts. But new research reveals that duplication isn’t necessarily a dead end to sales.

A new study, titled: “Duplicate Leads: Unrealized Value or Waste of Time?” and conducted by Leads360, found that leads flagged as duplicates have a conversion rate that is 167% above average.

ANNUITAS announced the addition of Jason Stewart, a recognized B2B demand generation veteran, as its VP of Demand Generation.

Stewart, formerly Director of Marketing for Demandbase, brings extensive experience in driving integrated demand generation programs and content to ANNUITAS and will further expand the marketing team, according to Carlos Hidalgo, CEO and Principal of ANNUITAS.

CallidusCloud released LeadFormix Summer 2013, the latest version of the vendor’s marketing automation platform that includes new social, lead generation and reporting tools. The upgrade will enable marketers to generate more high-quality leads in less time and at lower cost, according to company officials.