This section highlights news announcements, solution provider growth news and platform enhancements in the B2B industry.
Callidus Software, a provider of sales and marketing effectiveness cloud software, announced today that Violin Memory, a vendor of memory-based storage solutions for enterprises, has selected seven suite solutions to transform sales results.
People Pattern, a marketing analytics platform, has received $4.5 million in Series A funding. The investment will allow People Pattern to deploy its technology on a much broader level, according to company officials.
The platform automates the collection and analysis of audience data, and combines social business and data science. This equips marketers with predictive segmentation data in real-time to better recognize, target and engage active and potential consumers.
The merger fever that started at the end of 2012 with Oracle’s acquisition of Eloqua spilled over into 2013, with Salesforce’s purchase of ExactTarget and Oracle continuing to fill out its Marketing Cloud with acquisitions of Compendium and Responsys. Not to mention Marketo’s IPO, causing many observers to speculate that it was also a takeover target.
But acquisitions weren’t the only thing on the minds of B2B marketers this year. They continued to soak up information about content marketing, social, sales enablement and account-based marketing, to name a few of the hot topics this year.
Taboola, a content distribution and discovery platform, deployed a mobile API designed to allow publishers to integrate content recommendations in non-desktop environments, such as native apps, mobile web sites and connected televisions.
Mobile application developer and advertiser StepLeader has integrated the API into more than 100 mobile apps, resulting in the first native app deployment of Taboola across Android and iOS platforms, according to company officials.
Key performance indicator weaknesses at every stage of the marketing funnel affect the ability of organizations to achieve business goals, according to a study released by PR 20/20. The 2014 Marketing Score Report looks how 318 professionals rate their organizations across more than 130 factors.
The report features analysis of how high performers excel in key marketing metrics; offers insight into 2014 marketing strategies; and identifies tips to improve overall marketing performance.
360Chestnut, a company that connects energy efficient contractors and homeowners, has improved its ability to deliver quality content to its audience as a result of using an integrated solution from Curata and HubSpot.
Tapping into the capabilities of Curata’s business-grade curation platform, coupled with HubSpot’s inbound marketing engine, enables marketers to efficiently fuel their content marketing engine while better engaging with their audience to establish thought leadership and gain buyer trust, company officials noted.
Just one month removed from being a Titanium sponsor of Salesforce’s Dreamforce event, a check of the Salesforce AppExchange shows that Marketo’s listing is no longer on the public portion of the site.
Several Marketo partners who did not want to be identified also confirmed that Marketo will not be invited to participate in Dreamforce next year.
Bandwidth.com, an Internet and telephone service provider, announced that it has partnered with Invoca to enhance Invoca’s back-end call marketing automation software.
The partnership was established to help improve Invoca’s API call marketing efficiency and user interface, while also supporting real-time optimizations that will provide call marketing to its current and future customers.
Oracle has agreed to acquire Responsys, a cloud-based marketing software and services provider, for approximately $1.5 billion. The purchase is expected to be finalized by Q2 2014.
The move broadens Oracle’s reach into online marketing automation. The company acquired marketing automation vendor Eloqua a year ago and content marketing software provider Compendium earlier this year.
