Adobe buys Marketo for almost US$5 billion

Adobe has been around for a few decades, but the recently announced acquisition — for the impressive amount of US$4.75 billion — of marketing automation firm Marketo is its largest corporate purchase so far. Thanks to this move, Adobe can close the gap that separates it from behemoths like Oracle and Salesforce.

Back in 2011, Marketo went public, and it was acquired for less than US$1.8 billion in May 2016. Vista Equity Partners is well-known for acquiring companies that show great potential and selling them after a while for a solid profit. In this case, the goal has been easily achieved, since Marketo apparently doubled its value in less than three years. 

According to Brad Rencher, executive vice president and general manager for Adobe's Digital Experience, "The acquisition of Marketo widens Adobe’s lead in customer experience across B2C and B2B and puts Adobe Experience Cloud at the heart of all marketing."

Marketo comes with a feature-rich and cloud-native platform and an ecosystem that includes more than 500 partners, as well as an active marketing community of more than 65,000 members. The transaction should close during the final quarter of the current fiscal year and, once that is done, Marketo's CEO, Steve Lucas, will join Adobe's senior leadership team, but will also remain at the helm of the Marketo team, which will become a part of Adobe's Digital Experience business.