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, but this is the second marketing-specific acquisition Teradata has made in the last 17 months, having purchased Aprimo for $ 525 million in December 2010. The goal is to own a piece of customers’ marketing efforts from the direct mailing all the way to big data analytics.

For those who haven’t been paying attention, companies promising to help businesses better manage and analyze their marketing data have been doing very well lately. At least one investor has called it the next big-money sector in technology. This is because it’s getting so much more difficult to target users effectively thanks to the myriad ways they interact with media both online and offline. Anything that helps better target customers and optimize budget dollars will attract some users.

Indeed. Cloud-based startup Marketo, for example, recently raised $ 50 million for its service that manages revenue from sales leads through marketing effort. Companies applying big data techniques to marketing data are also very much in vogue, often employing predictive analytics to huge amounts of data to help businesses determine how and where to spend their marketing money.

Once the eCircle deal closes, likely within the next couple months, Teradata will have a little bit of everything in the marketing department. Aprimo is a platform for integrating marketing data and helping target the right customers with the right offers, while eCircle sells products and services for carrying out email- and social-media-based marketing efforts. Teradata’s flagship software, along with its Aster Data lineup, can provide big-data-type analytics from across any of a company’s data sources, structured or unstructured.

For Teradata, though, picking up eCircle might be as much defensive as it is about capitalizing on a hot market. IBM, with which Teradata competes in the general analytics space, has been investing heavily in marketing analytics over the past couple years, including with its acquisitions of Unica and Coremetrics.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user susumis.

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