Microsoft Dynamics CRM Marketing Automation Field Shrinks with Silverpop Purchase of CoreMotives

Silverpop, a major player in the red hot marketing automation space, announced at Convergence 2012 that it has acquired marketing automation ISV CoreMotives, a three year old firm focused strictly on Microsoft Dynamics CRM. 

"CoreMotives and Silverpop share a similar vision-to help marketers build amazing online relationships quickly and easily," wrote Silverpop CEO Bill Nussey in announcing the deal on the Silverpop blog.

Nussey put the number of CoreMotives clients at 800 in 34 countries. But according to CoreMotives co-founder Rhett Thompson, the company is already closing in on 900 clients, including newer, larger wins like Weight Watchers and Barclays Bank, who reportedly have over 35,000 Dynamics CRM seats.

According to Thompson, the acquisition decision came down to a few factors that included a need to address the rapidly growing technical demands of managing vast numbers of emails and larger Azure server clusters to manage more and bigger customers.  Silverpop offers a more robust technical platform, which sends many times the email volume of CoreMotives and will become part of an updated backbone to the CoreMotives solution.  Other reasons Thompson cited include Silverpop's maturity as a company's expertise, stability, and growth prospects. 

But Thompson added that the CoreMotives product is not going anywhere.  The acquisition by Silverpop represents the larger firm's effort to penetrate the quickly evolving marketing automation opportunities of the Dynamics CRM space which is heating up as attention grows from other major marketing automation firms like Marketo, ExactTarget, and Eloqua, as well as smaller firms more closely tied to Dynamics CRM like ClickDimensions and SalesFusion.

Nussey echoed that sentiment in his blog post, writing: "...