Marketo acquires Insightera's real-time marketing personalisation suite

Marketing automation suite vendor, Marketo, has acquired real-time personalisation platform provider, Insightera, as part of plans to build its capabilities around cross-channel marketing.

Insightera’s platform allows users to personalise websites and mobile interactions based on company, industry, location and visit history. According to Marketo, the integration of the platform into its own automation and segmentation solution will help marketers gain a more unified view of their customers and give them the ability to manage one-to-one interactions in real-time.

Under the agreement, Insightera’s Israeli office will become Marketo’s new innovation centre for big data and predictive analytics. The company also has a California office.

Marketo will continue supporting Insightera customers and capabilities including those using third-party marketing automation solutions. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.

“Since the beginning, Marketo has been laser-focused on its vision of helping marketers to create deep, individual customer relationships across channels and over time,” Marketo president and CEO, Phil Fernandez, said. “By augmenting our industry-leading marketing automation with Insightera’s real-time personalisation capabilities, we are delivering on our vision to unify disparate channels and create timely, individualised relationships.”

The acquisition comes seven months after Marketo raised US$79 million in its first IPO offering, marking its next phase of growth. Since its launch in 2006, the company has raised $107m in venture capital funding to build out its marketing automation suite and presence globally.

Insightera CEO and co-founder, Mickey Alon, pointed out many of its current customers are using the Marketo platform including SanDisk, NICE Systems and Blue Jeans Network. The company is already an integrated partner in Marketo’s LaunchPoint ecosystem.

“We’re thrilled to add our capabilities to the industry’s best digital marketing platform, and together help marketers to listen and respond at scale across channels and time,” Alon said. “Marketo has a powerful vision for the future of marketing that no other company can match.”

The Insightera deal is expected to close shortly. In a statement, Marketo said it also planned to invest in new products and capabilities including real-time personalisation and unified cross-channel conversations.

Marketo IPO may spark suitors, including Salesforce.com
Marketo rolls out customer engagement tools
How imagination and marketing automation helped Navitas’ marketing agenda

Blue Jeans Network director of online marketing and marketing operations, Kaushik Patel, welcomed the acquisition. “Using Insightera and Marketo together, we are able to create unified ‘listen and respond’ conversations that cultivate richer customer relationships and drive greater growth,” he was quoted as saying in Marketo’s market release. “We are very ecited about what the future holds as these two great solutions are integrated more deeply.”

President and CTO of Ion Interactive and well known marketing technologist, Scott Brinker, said the deal was a good move by Marketo. "We're seeing a shift from passive data collection to more active data-driven experiences in the marketing automation space," he told CMO. "There is a lot of opportunity for innovation in this direction."

Over the past year, Marketo also acquired social campaign management platform, Crowd Factory, and launched its Marketo Financial Management applications suite aimed at marketing operations.

Follow CMO on Twitter: @CMOAustralia, take part in the CMO Australia conversation on LinkedIn: CMO Australia, or join us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CMOAustralia