Silverpop acquisition by IBM valued at $270 million

Marketing automation companies are going fast. In the news is the Silverpop acquisition by none other than IBM. IBM is in advanced talks to take over the marketing automation company from Atlanta for a reported $270 million. This $270 million is roughly three times the annual revenue of Silverpop. The annual revenue currently is estimated at $80 to $90 million currently.
Only two companies remain in the marketing automation industry in the USA who are still privately owned: Silverpop and Hubspot. Quite a few others have been acquired in the past few years. Just last year, Salesforce acquired ExactTarget for the hefty sum of $2.5 billion. Also, in 2012, Oracle acquired Eloqua for $871 million. In the same year, Vocus acquired iContact for $169 million. Acquisitions are nothing new in the industry, as you can see. However, this expanding of product portfolios means there will only be a few large companies controlling nearly all platforms that offer online marketing solutions.
Silverpop currently has about 500 employees, and has some impressive names in its client portfolio including Disney.
Previous acquisitions besides the Silverpop acquisition by IBM include Coremetrics, Unica and SPSS. Other companies in the (email) marketing automation industry that receive acquisition interest include WhatCounts. WhatCounts in turn took over Blue Sky Factory back in 2011, as well as executing a number of other acquisitions in the past years.
Read more on the Silverpop acquisition by IBM here.