In Part I of our series on the rise of the digital marketing suite we laid the foundation for the categories that the CMO buys within. For Part II we moved on to talk about the broad landscape of who is currently operating in the space today and selling into the CMO suite. In Part III we continued to understand how all the major players got to where they are covering the largest players in the space like Adobe Systems, Salesforce, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft. As we know that is not the full picture of who is operating in the space so for Part IV we will move outside of the Big 5 to see “who are the major independent companies that are talking to CMOs?“ We will follow our categories and begin with analytics going from the earliest market leader in the space to today.
This category is arguably the oldest out there, beginning with SAS Institute‘s entry into the market around 1976. While we don’t hear a ton about them today, the company still sells well into the CMO for highly custom and focused analytics work and boasts over 60,000 customers worldwide and 70%+ of the F500. The company is an unbelievable start-up story, never raising venture capital and staying profitable for over 35 years.
In 1993, Webtrends launched with their Webtrends Analytics product which has lost share in recent years but still has over 10,000 CMO customers.
In 1995, 24/7 Media (WPP) launched into the market to target the CMO with a multitude of solutions including analytics and the company was later acquired by WPP in 2007 ($649M EV / 3.0x LTM Revs) and still operates in the market today through many of their brands and agencies.
In 1998 Aprimo launched their product to market and has historically worked through resellers including folks like Microsoft, Salesforce and Adobe on the CMO side. They offer a multitude of tools and could be in a number of our categories but have probably their biggest product in analytics. The company was acquired by Teradata in 2011 ($500M EV / 7.4x LTM Revs).
Also in 1998, KXEN launched to the market which continues to have a strong customer list in predictive analytics and in 2013 was acquired by SAP ($40M EV / 3.3x LTM Revs).
The only independent public company focused on analytics, comScore, followed in 1999 with their launch and today offer analytics tools from their core product as well as products from their 2009 acquisition of Certifica and 2011 acquisition of AdXpose ($22M EV / 7.1 LTM Revs).
We see a lull in the market until 2005 when Google acquires Urchin and Adaptive Path to build out what we know today as Google Analytics. The product is arguably the largest in the market from a customer and revenue standpoint.
Also in 2005, Aster Data Systems launched its analytics package on top of its database management system and in 2011 the company was picked up by Teradata ($295M EV / Undisclosed). The company still has some strong marquee clients and is well known around the big data layer of marketing analytics.
In 2007 Nielsen entered the market via it’s Nielsen Online product which combined internal tools with prior acquisitions in 2007 of Buzzmetrics and NetRatings. The company has one of the largest product suites around analytics out there and given the Nielsen broader vision remains a major player in the market.
Finally in 2011 and 2012 we see Yahoo! enter the market via it’s acquisition of interclick ($265M EV / 2.2x LTM Revs) and Infor enter the space via it’s acquisition of Orbis Global and merging of the original e.piphany product into what they today call the Infor Epiphany Enterprise Suite.
We admit there are more companies in the space on the independent side but these represent the largest today in our opinion. If you have any additions let us know and next up we will move on to Content Management and take a look at the large independent vendors in that category.
