On September 20th, Adobe announced they have reached an agreement to acquire Marketo, the market-leading cloud platform for B2B marketing engagement. At a sizeable price tag of $4.75 billion, Adobe has added a B2B platform that brings together planning, engagement and analytics to their own marketing hub, Adobe Experience Cloud. As these two powerhouses combine into one, let’s take a look at Adobe’s tactics and their potential plans for the future.

Adobe joining the market at just the right time

The Adobe Experience Cloud, formerly known as the Adobe Marketing Cloud, serves as a collection of integrated marketing and web analytics products within the Adobe Suite. Since the Experience Cloud debuted in 2012, Adobe has introduced itself into the marketing field with applications like Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target and Adobe Social. However, it is known the Adobe Experience Cloud has drastically lagged behind the Adobe Creative Suite, as total revenue is reported at a 20/80 split between the two respectively.

With the acquisition of Marketo, Adobe has established itself as a major player in the automation market. Globally, B2B marketers spend almost 22% of their marketing budget on technology, and 66% plan on increasing their technology spending within the coming year. Marketo, already established as a leader in B2B marketing tools, has Adobe poised to become a significant member of the market with this new acquisition.

Strength in Partnership

Adobe has partnered with Microsoft extensively over the past decade. The two announced a long term strategic partnership in 2016 which has led to integrations of the Adobe Experience Cloud with Microsoft Azure. Also, the Adobe Sign software was partnered with Microsoft’s Flow almost a year ago, which ultimately led to another partnership: the Adobe Experience Manager being incorporated with Microsoft’s marketing tool Dynamics 365.

Salesforce and Google, however, have also been involved with their fair share of partnerships, similar to the relationship developed by Microsoft and Adobe. Adobe’s acquisition of Marketo heightens this “tag team” battle, as they will almost certainly compete with the partnership of Salesforce and Google.

Functionality

On the consumer side, what can be expected is a seamless connection between Adobe and Marketo, along with enhancements within Marketo that provide better marketing solutions. Better content management, online personalization, proofing of your audience and e-commerce enhancements are aspects that can be enhanced within Marketo’s platform, all tools needed to widen the gap between themselves and other CRM’s. As Adobe was looking to enter the B2B sector, Marketo was looking to increase their reach within the B2C market. Marketo users should be thrilled with the thought of enhanced platform features at the hands of Adobe, as their software experience is expected to become more user-friendly.

With all of this being said, look out in the coming year for what Adobe has in store for Marketo. We may be in the midst of a major breakthrough in the marketing automation world.