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.