As Thursday comes to a close, Zeta Interactive has announced a new acquisition that increases its footprint in Silicon Valley.
If that sounds like a familiar growth pattern for this New York-based big data and analytics company, it should.
About a year ago, Zeta Interactive raised a $125 million round, and then several months later acquired a division of eBay Enterprise to become a bigger player in data-driven marketing technology and customer relationship management. Zeta, founded in 2007, had already developed a marketing platform that brands use to reach out to potential customers.
In today’s deal, Zeta picked up the Acxiom Impact enterprise marketing business from Acxiom, an enterprise data and analytics company headquartered in Little Rock, AR.
Steven Gerber, chief operating officer with Zeta, says today’s acquisition will help strengthen his company’s competitive positioning, give it more scale, talent, and access to additional clients, and further enhance its technology platform.
The acquisition will add some 300 people to Zeta’s staff of about 1,000. The deal includes Acxiom Impact operations overseas in Poland, the Czech Republic, India, and Britain, as well as domestically in New York, Boston, and Nashville, TN. Acxiom Impact’s engineering team is based primarily in Redwood Shores, Gerber says, referring to the waterfront community in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Staff may be moved on a case-by-case basis, but in New York the teams will be consolidated into Zeta’s headquarters, he says. Eventually the Silicon Valley offices, where the companies also overlap, will combine as well.
This marks Zeta’s tenth acquisition, Gerber says, a process that has taken on a certain rhythm for the company. After about six months of integrating the staff and technology, Zeta will look at how to position the combined company to further compete, he says. “Acxiom is very good at multichannel marketing, helping clients market across all digital channels,” Gerber says. (Acxiom’s platform has a specific feature that Zeta wants to work into its own.)
There are some differences with this deal compared with the customer relationship management division Zeta picked up from eBay Enterprise. The acquisition from eBay was more of a turnaround for that business unit, which Gerber says had gone through some challenges including changes in strategic direction and lack of investment in the platform. “That’s not the case here,” Gerber says, regarding the Acxiom deal.
