Last week, Salesforce bought sales data intelligence startup RelateIQ for $350 million. But that’s just the latest deal in the marketing tech sector, which has seen several billion-dollar acquisitions in the past couple of years.
It could also be a hint about the future: predictive apps.
While the bulk of the billions of dollars spent so far have been in the marketing automation space, with Oracle’s acquisition of Eloqua and Salesforce’s 2013 acquisition of ExactTarget, significant amounts of money are now shifting to predictive apps, which help brands understand what’s happening, and what it means for tomorrow’s mindshare and marketshare.