News

Salesforce.com — long thought to be in the market to acquire a marketing automation vendor since Oracle bought Eloqua — announced plans to purchase ExactTarget for about $2.5 billion. The move comes as a bit of a surprise to industry observers, who noted that Marketo’s recent successful IPO positioned the company as an appealing acquisition target for Salesforce.com.

The transaction, which has been unanimously approved by the Boards of Directors of both companies, is expected to close late in Salesforce.com's fiscal second quarter, ending July 31. The acquisition is expected to increase total revenue by $120 to $125 million in fiscal year 2014.

Skyword, a content production platform provider, recently landed $6.7 million in growth financing led by Cox Media Group. The investment is said to help expand the team and help scale the company to meet increasing customer and partner needs, according to Skyword officials.

“We are in the midst of a perfect storm in the digital information era,” said Tom Gerace, Founder and CEO of Skyword. “Today’s converged media landscape and the evolving relationship between brands and consumers are driving marketers and publishers to rethink their tried-and-true strategies and invest in new technology solutions to better connect with customers. Cox Media Group continues to be a strategic partner in our growth as we push to reshape the industry.”

Brainshark, recently introduced the Brainshark Sales Enabalement Portal for sales teams to manage content in a single, searchable repository. As part of the Sales Enablement Suite, the portal is mobile-optimized to enable team members to find, filter and search for relevant sales, marketing and training materials, according to Brainshark officials.

Certain Inc., a provider of enterprise event management solutions, announced enhancements to its SaaS platform that enable marketers to personalize events for attendees by steering them toward the appropriate educational content and connections.

“Events represent the last marketing channel to be fully digitized and integrated into sales and marketing infrastructure, although marketers are spending 25% to 36% of their budgets on events,” Betsy Zikalis, VP of Global Marketing for Certain, told Demand Gen Report. “The idea is to make events more productive for marketers and attendees, pointing attendees to the right activities, right sessions they should go to and social networks they should tap into based on their roles and interests, among other factors.”

Shares of Marketo will start trading this morning at $13 a share, company officials announced.

Marketo will begin trading 6,059,509 shares of its common stock offering on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the symbol "MKTO."