Aprimo Brand Re-emerges as Marketing Operations Specialist and Merges with Revenew Distributed Marketing System

When we last left Teradata Marketing Applications, it had just been sold to Marlin Equity Partners, whose major previous investment in marketing technology was SaaS email provider BlueHornet. At the time, I expected Marlin would merge the Teradata applications (mostly the old Aprimo product line, plus eCircle email and some other bits) with BlueHornet and was puzzled by why Marlin thought this would result in a good business.

Well, it turns out I was half right: Marlin announced this morning that it is splitting up the business it bought and merging the marketing execution pieces (email, campaign management, etc.) with BlueHornet. The other part – marketing operations functions including planning, workflow, asset management, content distribution, and analytics – will reemerge under the Aprimo brand and be merged with distributed marketing specialist Revenew, which Marline also announced today it has just acquired.

This makes a lot of sense to me. Mrketing operations was Aprimo’s original product and greatest competitive strength. It’s about as unsexy a business as you can imagine, and one that has mostly been merged into larger marketing suites by vendors like SAS, IBM, Adobe, SAP, Oracle, and Infor.  It has also been strangely divided between enterprise systems, like Aprimo’s, and specialists in distributed marketing (basically sharing assets with branch offices and channel partners such as distributors, agents, franchisees, etc.) such as Zift Solutions, BrandMuscle and Sproutloud. Revenew competes in the latter arena, so it’s a nice complement to Aprimo’s marketing operations features. In a conversation yesterday, Marlin and Aprimo management told me they hope that an offering that combines enterprise and distributed marketing operations management will be appealing to companies that now do them with separate systems.

It’s a reasonable bet, although far from a certain winner.  Separate fiefdoms within large companies don’t always want to cooperate and the big marketing suites will still be hovering over it all, claiming to do everything (or integrate with partners who fill their gaps). There’s also a question of whether Aprimo’s product, first released in 1999, still meets the needs of today’s marketing operations – although Aprimo management pointed out that the system was built as Software as a Service from the start, and further promised quick innovation now that they are an independent business again.

Anyway, I’m no longer puzzled by Marlin’s strategy with the acquisition and see how it could turn out well for them. Good luck to all concerned!