Teradata buys eCircle to get more of your marketing data
Data warehouse veteran Teradata announced on Wednesday it is buying German software company eCircle in an attempt to gain a stronger presence in fast-growing world of marketing data. The terms of the deal weren't disclosed …
Context & Ripple Effects
Teradata, the long-established data warehouse vendor, announced on Wednesday that it is acquiring eCircle, a German provider of email and digital marketing software, with terms undisclosed. The deal was reported by GigaOM and picked up the same day by ZDNet, The Register and Information Age — broad trade circulation for a deal with no price attached, which itself reflects how much attention the marketing-data category was commanding among enterprise-analytics watchers in 2012.
For Teradata, whose core business is warehousing structured enterprise data, the move is an explicit push beyond the warehouse into the operational side of marketing: the stated rationale is a stronger presence in the fast-growing marketing-data market, putting campaign execution and customer contact data inside the same vendor that houses the analytics layer.
First-order effects
- eCircle's existing client base of European marketers now has a new owner in Teradata, gaining a path to connect campaign data directly with Teradata's warehouse and analytics estate rather than integrating third-party tools.
- Teradata's sales narrative changes immediately: instead of selling storage and query power alone, it can pitch an integrated stack that spans customer data collection through analysis to executed campaigns.
Second-order effects
- Rival data-warehouse and analytics vendors face pressure to answer with marketing-software acquisitions of their own, since the buyer of the analytics layer increasingly wants to own the marketing application layer too.
- Independent email-service providers and campaign platforms lose positioning flexibility — with a major warehouse vendor owning one of them, remaining independents become both acquisition targets and harder sells against bundled alternatives.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, enterprise data infrastructure consolidates around full-stack marketing data platforms, blurring the line between database vendors and marketing-cloud vendors and forcing CMOs and CIOs into overlapping purchasing decisions.
- European martech firms become strategic assets in this land-grab, as US-centric analytics vendors acquire established regional customer bases rather than building distribution organically.
The trend: Data-warehouse incumbents are buying their way from analytics infrastructure into marketing applications, turning customer data into the connective asset of the enterprise stack.