Adobe Spends $600M for Neolane in Marketing Software Buy

Marketing software is officially the place to be for IPOs and big acquisition deals.

Today, Adobe announced that it was paying $600 million in cash for Neolane, a Paris-based marketing software company with strong Boston-area ties. Neolane’s U.S. headquarters are in Newton, MA, and its lead venture investor is Boston’s Battery Ventures, which led the company’s $27 million round early last year.

Privately held Neolane reported $58 million in revenue for 2012, and said it was once again profitable. The company has about 300 employees worldwide, with about 80 in Newton, co-founder Stephan Dietrich told the Boston Business Journal earlier this year.

There’s no word about the fate of those Boston-area employees, with two exceptions—in its announcement, Adobe said Dietrich and chief product officer Suresh Vittal were expected to join Adobe, along with the rest of Neolane’s top managers.

Neolane’s services will become part of Adobe’s Marketing Cloud offering, one of many software products aimed at helping companies track and manage their marketing spending.

There have been plenty of deals in the sector lately as companies hit the public stock markets or get snapped up by bigger players hoping to consolidate several products. Marketo went public in May, while Salesforce.com recently spent $2.5 billion for ExactTarget.

Salesforce, by the way, is also an investor in Cambridge, MA-based HubSpot—a fast-growing marketing software company that has raised around $100 million in investment backing and says it is headed for its own IPO in the not-so-distant future.

Author: Curt Woodward

Curt covered technology and innovation in the Boston area for Xconomy. He previously worked in Xconomy’s Seattle bureau and continued some coverage of Seattle-area tech companies, including Amazon and Microsoft. Curt joined Xconomy in February 2011 after nearly nine years with The Associated Press, the world's largest news organization. He worked in three states and covered a wide variety of beats for the AP, including business, law, politics, government, and general mayhem. A native Washingtonian, Curt earned a bachelor's degree in journalism from Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. As a past president of the state's Capitol Correspondents Association, he led efforts to expand statehouse press credentialing to online news outlets for the first time.