News

Bizo, a provider of business audience marketing technology, has raised $12.5 million in venture debt financing from City National Bank. This round of funding puts Bizo at approximately $30 million in total equity and debt capital. Bizo plans to use the funding to continue its expansion, further build out its technology platform and make strategic investments, according to company officials.

According to Russell Glass, CEO of Bizo, the financing ensures the company is “well capitalized to maintain its leadership position in the B2B online marketing space and is well-positioned to make strategic investments as we continue to build a thriving business.”

Salesforce.com and Oracle may be rivals when it comes to marketing automation, but they are now partners in the cloud. The two companies signed a nine-year partnership agreement encompassing all three tiers of cloud computing — applications, platform and infrastructure.

Salesforce.com plans to standardize on the Oracle Linux operating system, Exadata engineered systems, the Oracle Database, and Java Middleware Platform. Oracle plans to integrate Salesforce.com with Oracle’s Fusion HCM and Financial Cloud, and provide the core technology to power Salesforce.com's applications and platform. Salesforce.com will also implement Oracle’s Fusion HCM and Financial cloud applications throughout the company.

Business information provider ZoomInfo announced that it surpassed the 100,000-member mark for its ZoomInfo Community Edition, which provides B2B marketers with updated company data, including business emails, direct phone numbers, company background and news mentions.

The service, which does not require a subscription, enables members to search and segment profiles that are continuously refreshed with data from thousands of news sites, millions of company web sites and contributions members, according to ZoomInfo officials.

Leads360, a provider of cloud-based intelligent sales automation solutions, announced that the company has changed its name to Velocify.

Nick Hedges, CEO of Velocify, told Demand Gen Report that the rebranding more accurately reflects the vendor’s mission to help organizations across industries increase revenue and close deals more quickly.

Industry observers speculate that Salesforce.com is taking a more adversarial stance toward some competing marketing automation vendors in the wake of its announced plans to acquire ExactTarget. Marketo was slated to have a booth and a speaking slot at a Salesforce customer event last week in New York, but they did not have a presence. Silverpop was the only marketing automation vendor to have a booth at the event.

Sources told Demand Gen Report that Marketo was excluded from the event because of a conflict over some recent unspecified comments made by Marketo officials, but the friction has been resolved. Marketo is expected to be involved in a Toronto event this Wednesday, according to Salesforce officials.

Marketo and Eloqua are no longer listed on the SFDC AppExchange, although HubSpot remains on the exchange.