Salesforce.com to buy marketing software provider ExactTarget for $2.5 bn

Enterprise cloud computing company Salesforce.com Inc today said it would buy marketing software provider ExactTarget, for about $2.5 billion in cash.

Under the deal which would be its biggest acquisition yet, Salesforce.com will pay $33.75 a share, a 11.7 per cent premium over ExactTarget's yesterday closing price of $22.10.

Founded in 2000, Indianapolis-based ExactTarget is a leading provider of cross-channel digital marketing SaaS or software-as-a-service solutions that allows companies to communicate with their customers through email, mobile, social media, web and marketing automation.

ExactTarget's suite of integrated applications enables marketers to plan, automate, deliver and optimise data-driven digital marketing and real-time communications.

It has more than 6,000 companies around the world as its clients, including Coca-Cola, Gap and Nike.

Salesforce.com said that the dramatic increase in consumer and business use of social networks, mobile devices, and new digital technologies is causing a revolution in marketing, as budgets previously spent on traditional media are now moving to digital campaigns.

Gartner estimates that by 2015 consumer technology companies will have switched one-third of their traditional marketing budgets to digital by 2017.

San Francisco, California-based Salesforce.com is best known for its customer relationship management (CRM) product.

Its cloud-based CRM software provides sales representatives with a complete customer profile and account history, allows the user to manage marketing campaign spending and performance across a variety of channels from a single application, tracks all opportunity-related data, decision makers, customer communications, and any other information unique to the company's sales process.

The company has grown through aggressive acquisitions to reach more than $3.1billion in revenue last year.

Its last acquisition was carried out in June 2013, when it purchased Buddy Media, the five-year-old company that helps brands manage their presence on social networking sites, for about $689 million.