Last week Oracle announced they were buying Dyn. Interesting acquisition, but fills a spot in Oracle’s playbook to provide infrastructure.
None of the press releases I’ve seen about the acquisition mentions the Dyn email service platform. Oracle has at least two email platforms already (Eloqua and Responsys). It will be interesting to see what happens with email.
Being on the west coast, I’m usually not yet awake when the 9am eastern press releases go out. So I’m often late on BREAKING NEWS!! in the email industry.
This morning it was the news that Oracle bought Responsys. Most news reports seem to agree that the purchase price was $1.5B, although a couple places are putting that at a lower figure of “about $1.39B.”
In any case, congrats to Responsys shareholders for getting a premium on their stock price.
Earlier this week Bloomberg news reported that an anonymous source told them Verizon was looking to acquire or investigate a partnership with AOL. It didn’t take long for the Verizon CEO to quash the acquisition rumors. Acquisitions and partnerships have always been around in technology, this is nothing new. But it made me think a little bit about the acquisitions and mergers in the ESP space.
The last 2 years have seen unexpected purchases of ESPs. Oracle bought Eloqua. Deluxe acquired Vertical Response. IBM has acquired a number of players in the email space, including parts of mail.com, SilverPop and Pivotal Veracity. eBay acquired e-Dialog. Salesforce acquired ExactTarget. Big companies seem to use the acquisition process to acquire the technology needed to send mail to and on behalf of their customers.
I’ve heard some people claim this is the beginning of the end of the stand alone ESP. I disagree. I think there is enough market demand to support stand alone ESPs. But the market is crowded and there are a lot of ESPs out there. There will be some consolidation. Some ESPs will be bought, either for their technology or their staff. Some ESPs will change and add more features. Some big companies will decide to install big appliances to run their own marketing in house.
Things will change but that’s what happen as a market matures. And the ESP market is maturing.
Who do you think will be bought next?