Dynamics Introspective: Will marketing acquisitions change CRM competitiveness?

CRM market watchers seem to agree that Salesforce's plan to acquire ExactTarget represents an important new consolidation move by a major CRM vendor. But questions around how and when ExactTarget will really begin to help Salesforce, and how it might impact Microsoft and other CRM competitors have already become a point of debate.

What does it mean for marketing software?

Research the popular email marketing and marketing automation platforms and you'll find that they can all integrate (in some way) with the major CRM vendors.  So while ExactTarget has plenty of Salesforce customers already, they also have Dynamics CRM, Sage, SAP, and SugarCRM customers who will be more interested the continued improvement of the ExtactTarget platform than the prolonged build out better Salesforce Marketing Cloud alignment.

"I think the companies this affects most are SAP, Microsoft and Sage - add in NetSuite too.  With Eloqua and now ExactTarget in enemy encampments there are fewer marketing options for these companies," wrote Denis Pombrian of Beagle Research. "This could make Marketo the bell of the ball for these vendors though right now Marketo is well tuned to being in the Salesforce ecosystem but it is not exclusive to be sure.  So maybe Marketo walks out of this with a clearer landscape and more market power."

And Tony Byrne of the Real Story Group sees little direct impact for customers of either company in the short term - marketing automation will continue to be competitive, both inside and outside the Salesforce ...