M&A (Marlin and Associates) report focuses on its current sense of the m&a values and activities in the Enterprise Data and Analytics sector. This is M&A’s second Market Update focused on this sector.
Software-based analytics have long been required tools for marketers and sales professionals at the world’s largest enterprises as they try to understand the impact of recent changes in price, features, or promotional efforts in the context of an ever-changing market. But two things have changed markedly over the past few years:
The first is the rapid proliferation of reasonably priced (often cloud-based) sophisticated software-based analytic tools that leverage the explosion of inexpensive bandwidth, data storage capacity, and computing power, combined with more readily available data about activity on transactions as well as data on social media and web traffic. The result is a series of tools designed to allow even small and medium sized businesses to have reasonably priced access to tools that are just as sophisticated as those used by large enterprises to help them understand the past impact of sales and marketing actions.
The second is the melding of these tools with big data aggregation, data mining, decision modeling, behavioral data, and machine learning (perhaps with a dash of artificial intelligence) – in an effort to not only recognize patterns, but also to anticipate them. These new “predictive analytic tools” are already helping sales professionals and marketers understand the likely effects of tactical decisions before they are made. And as they do, they are disrupting the traditional sales and marketing model for a growing number of enterprises, both large and small, across the globe.
The people with money to invest have noticed. Over the past few months, firms such as InsideSales ($60mm), Lattice Engines ($28mm), Leadspace ($18mm), and Tango Analytics ($30mm) have raised capital from name brand institutional investors to expand their predictive analytics platforms. Strategic acquirers have also been active in the space with LinkedIn acquiring Fliptop, News Corp acquiring Unruly Group, Twitter acquiring TellApart, MasterCard acquiring Applied Predictive Technologies, Software AG acquiring Predixion Software, and Advance Communication Corp acquiring 1010data. Just to name a few. Even megavendor Salesforce.com announced at its Dreamforce conference its plans to roll out predictive data analytics to empower sales people with its RelateIQ platform, a company it had acquired in 2014 for $390mm.
US corporations spend about $23bn each year on sales and marketing related software. It’s a fascinating market that is changing rapidly – and M&A are watching it closely.
About: Marlin & Associates is a financial and strategic advisory firm and investment bank focused on advising owners and managers of U.S. and international companies that provide software, data, and related services. The firm is based in New York City, with offices in San Francisco, CA, Washington, DC, and Toronto, Canada. It has been the recipient of numerous awards including “Middle-Market Investment Bank of the Year,” “Middle-Market Financing Agent of the Year – Equity,” and “TMT Advisory Bank of the Year.” Two transactions on which Marlin & Associates advised have been recognized as “Deals-of-the Decade.”
To download the report click on this link: ent-da-monthly-newsletter-october-2015
