News

Act-On Software recently released a new “early experience program” enticing SugarCRM users to take a test drive of its cloud-based Integrated Marketing Platform.

As part of the “early experience program,” trial customers will have full-use access to the Act-On Integrated Marketing Platform, which combines email management with a menu of marketing tools. Early experience users will also have access to the pre-release version of the SugarCRM connector that provides seamless integration with SugarCRM data, according to a company press release.

After securing $32 million is Series D funding from major backers including Sequoia Capital, Google Ventures and Salesforce.com, HubSpot solidified its position as a leading player in the marketing software space.

DemandGen Report recently spoke with Mike Volpe, VP of Marketing at HubSpot, about the company’s current growth rate, as well as its unique positing versus other software providers in the marketing automation category.

A few highlights from the conversation include:

1. How HubSpot’s revenue climbed from $11 million to $25 million over the past year;
2. How the company is planning to add to another 2,000 customers to its current base of 4,000;
3. The company’s positioning versus other vendors in the marketing automation space.

Salesforce.com’s plans to acquire social media monitoring platform Radian6 for $326 million got a positive response from Wall Street. The announcement also had industry insiders immediately speculating about whether Salesforce would continue to expand into the marketing cloud with further acquisitions.

Salesforce pointed out that the acquisition will extend the value of the Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Chatter and Force.com with social intelligence. “With Radian6, salesforce.com is gaining the technology and market leader in social media monitoring,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. “We see this as a huge opportunity. Not only will this acquisition accelerate our growth, it will extend the value of all of our offerings.”

Online privacy has come under the microscope following the February introduction of a bill that would regulate the collection and use of information obtained from Internet tracking. The "Do Not Track Me Online Act of 2011" would give the Federal Trade Commission the right to create regulations that would force online marketers to offer online users the ability to opt-out of online tracking.

Given marketers’ pressure to focus on relevant, targeted offers, this could potentially impact the way marketers track and collect behavioral activity. “In a business environment, IT professionals may start to set company machine browser settings to a default do not track status which could have a pretty significant impact on online data collection and analytics,” said Dick Reed, CEO, Just Media. “The results in either case would be some very significant and negative impacts on both campaign targeting and analytics.”

ZoomInfo recently announced the addition of a new plug-in designed to find active business contacts in users’ email messages and automatically upload the information to the ZoomInfo BtoB directory. The plug-in offers salespeople, small business owners and jobseekers ongoing access to the entire ZoomInfo Database of millions of BtoB profiles.

The company said that during a market test of its new ZoomInfo Community Edition, more than 25,000 people installed the email plug-in, contributing approximately one million new contacts to ZoomInfo.