On May 31, Marketo announced it was acquired—by an unexpected suitor. Turns out software giants Microsoft and SAP weren’t the only ones participating in the courtship. Vista Equity Partners (Vista), a leading private equity firm, beat out the others, buying Marketo for about $1.79 billion, which, ironically, will enable Marketo to continue down its current path of product innovation.
According to Marketo Chairman and CEO, the acquisition will also enable Marketo to deliver on its bold vision, “to give tomorrow’s marketers and the C-suite an ultra-high-scale enterprise platform for customer engagement.”
He’s referring to Project Orion, a major undertaking announced at Marketo Summit in early May this year. Project Orion represents Marketo’s largest technology investment to date—a platform built to run across an entire enterprise, enabling 
the scale, performance and analytics necessary for interacting with customers at every stage of the buying journey. With Vista Equity Partners as the owner, Marketo has plenty of capital to invest in this project and additional innovation without concern from shareholders that are carefully watching profits.
And, by refusing to align with a company like Microsoft or SAP, Marketo has ensured its platform will be open and capable of integrating with existing and emerging marketing technologies. The market for such tools and solutions is huge—there are more than 3,000 out there now, with more on the way. Marketo will serve as a central hub for connecting those technologies to customer data, enabling marketing teams to create a technology stack that suits their specific needs, while consuming and processing vast amounts of customer data. As an independent, they will remain integration agnostic — you won’t have to worry about a lack of integration with your CRM for example.
In short, the acquisition is also a big step toward fulfilling Marketo’s vision of the future, and DemandGen will continue to be a big part of that effort.
As your needs grow, look to our seasoned Marketo-certified experts to provide the technical and strategic expertise to optimize the performance of your Marketo implementation.
For some tips and tricks on optimizing Marketo, take a look at our recent white paper, “How to Unlock the Power in Your Marketo Programs.”
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homas Terry is a Solutions Architect at DemandGen. He is responsible for enabling and supporting our client’s marketing and sales teams to adopt marketing automation and CRM systems and ultimately drive revenue. Thomas is a Marketo Certified Expert. Other articles by Thomas Terry: Four Steps To Success with Account-Based Nurturing
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