Private equity company Centerbridge is buying IBM’s marketing platform and commerce software to create a new standalone company destined to do battle in the marketing cloud space. The deal is expected to close in mid-2019 with Mark Simpson as the new CEO. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Allison Schiff explains the reasons behind IBM’s shift in this article from AdExchanger:
Rather than scrabbling over market share in the marketing cloud space, where Salesforce, Adobe and Oracle have been dropping billions, IBM is focusing on core technologies and infrastructure, AI, blockchain, global services, consulting and creating a cloud environment to compete with Amazon, Google and Microsoft. “That’s the big game IBM is hunting,” Stanhope said.
But even back when IBM seemed like it was ramping up its focus on marketing technology, there wasn’t necessarily buy in from the big wigs at the top. IBM also lost one of its marketing product cheerleaders when David Kenny, who led efforts at IBM Watson, left to take on the CEO role at Nielsen in November 2018.
“When we had conversations with them, the unit itself was quite interested in doing more, but we didn’t get the sense that there was the same commitment at the corporate level,” said Terry Kawaja, CEO and founder of investment bank LUMA Partners. “There was a kind of slowness in decisioning that calls this expression to mind: ‘She’s just not that into you.’”
And while IBM dallied, the other marketing clouds stepped up with significant acquisitions, and it became clear that marketing was not IBM’s top priority. “The table stakes for competing in this space went up materially, and it felt like IBM maybe wasn’t prepared to participate at that level,” Kawaja said.
