Adobe Scoops Up Marketo
The wide-moat firm's largest deal to date will further bolster its Experience Cloud as it attempts to widen its competitive positioning against Salesforce, Oracle, and SAP.
Wide-moat
In terms of Marketo, the marketing software player went public in 2013, before being acquired by Vista Equity Partners for $1.79 billion in 2016. Vista’s playbook is to acquire high-growth, mission-critical enterprise software firm and improve their operations. Visibility into Marketo’s financials is limited, but its most recent 10-K indicated that it did $209 million on the top line in 2015. Adobe’s $4.5 billion acquisition represents a significant premium to Vista’s original buyout in only a couple years.
On a stand-alone basis, we view Adobe’s Experience Cloud, which includes advertising, campaign management, and analytics, as one of the broadest digital marketing offering. Experience Cloud grew 21% year over year in Adobe’s third quarter. Magento and now Marketo help to fill potential holes in Adobe’s offerings, in our opinion.
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