Shareholders of San Mateo, Calif.-based Marketo approved the proposed sale of the marketing automation provider to Vista Equity Partners for $1.79 billion in a July 28 vote, according to a United States Securities and Exchange Commission document.
Of the more than 37 million shares of stock represented at the meeting at Marketo's headquarters, nearly 99 percent of them voted to approve the merger.
Marketo is still facing two class action lawsuits in connection with the deal, which will generate more than $58 million for company co-founder, CEO, President and Board Chair Phil Fernandez, court documents show.
In other technology news ...
Salesforce, SAP Executives Moving On
Two high-profile software companies lost high-profile executives this week.
Adam Bosworth, former Microsoft and Google executive, is resigning at EVP at Salesforce to take a senior position at Amazon Web Services, according to a report in Fortune. Bosworth led Salesforce's Internet of Things effort. Salesforce’s IoT cloud leverages Thunder, a massively scalable architecture designed to listen to the connected world.
At SAP, Sameer Patel, senior vice president of product management and go-to-market for SAP Cloud/Successfactors, announced his resignation this week.
"... Getting to be part of the SuccessFactors leadership team when I got here was the best possible boot camp on building and growing a SaaS business that anyone could dream of," Patel wrote.
He added he was proud to be a part of the SAP Jam team.
"I vividly remember parsing the big opportunity when we started, and how we framed a straight forward market strategy," Patel wrote. "There is no doubt that we delivered on our promise to build and sell products that would enable SAP to elbow into a leadership position in our industry."
Report: Rackspace Going Private
Public cloud hosting provider Rackspace could be going private, according to a report yesterday. Trading of San Antonio-based Rackspace was temporarily after Dow Jones reported the company was in “advanced talks” with private equity investors on a possible sale. Shares were up $2.93, almost 13 percent, to $26.09, before trading stopped.
Rackspace has market cap of around $3 billion, according to reports, but a deal could value the company at $4 billion. Rackspace was trading this morning at $26.1, up $2.94, or 12.6 percent.
MaritzCX Releases ActionCX
Lehi, Utah-based customer experience software and services provider MaritzCX announced the availability of ActionCX, an integrated Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution for turning customer feedback into actionable insights.
"Action plans are a great way to improve our customer experience by focusing attention on specific touch points,” Gregory Young, director of brand engagement at Mazda Canada, said in a statement. “Good action plans will capitalize on the wealth of data within our customer experience platform."
ActionCX includes customer feedback — reflected in customized reports and dashboards — to identify opportunities for organizational improvement. The product also helps teams track priorities, document plans for improvement, collaborate around those plans and measure their progress over time.
“Closing the loop on individual customer problems is great, but it’s only the first step to becoming a customer-focused organization,” Carine Clark, president and CEO of MaritzCX, said in a statement. “ActionCX has the potential to make organizations more customer-focused at their core. It’s ability to create insights that can drive organization-wide change fills a critical gap that has been limiting the effectiveness of CX programs today.”
OpenText Revenues Down
It also reported revenue losses in:
- Recurring revenue: $1.5 billion, down 1 percent
- Cloud services and subscription revenue: $601 million, down 1 percent
- License revenue: $284 million, down 4 percent
OpenText CEO Mark Barrenechea touted a rise in constant currency year over year.
"Fiscal 2016 was a pivotal year for OpenText. In constant currency, we grew revenues 3 percent and created a more efficient business," he said in a statement. "... More importantly, we believe we have created the foundation for Fiscal 2017 to be a double-digit growth year led by M&A. During our Fiscal 2016 fourth quarter we announced four acquisitions that will add revenue, operating income and cash flow."
OpenText acquired customer experience software assets from HP this year. It also acquired Recommind and announced innovations in enterprise collaboration and cognitive technology at its annual conference in Nashville last month.
Ping Identity Acquires UnboundID
Denver-based Ping Identity, which provides identity defined security, this week announced that it has acquired UnboundID, a provider of customer identity and access management software. Terms were not disclosed.
Ping adds a highly scalable user directory for social login, customer preference and profile management, officials said. Ping also offers multi-factor authentication, single sign-on and secure access capabilities.
“Delivering a personalized and consistent customer experience across all channels is core to many digital transformation initiatives,” Andre Durand, CEO of Ping Identity, said in a statement. “UnboundID has clearly earned the trust of global brands as one of the highest performing user and identity directories on the market."
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Medallia Appoints Head of Customer Success
Palo Alto customer experience management provider Medallia has appointed Bryan Busse as vice president of customer success.
A nine-year Salesforce.com veteran with more than 15 years of executive experience, Busse joins Medallia as the company has surpassed $125 million in revenue, according to company officials.
“Customer experience has become such a strategic imperative for today’s organizations — in fact, the majority of Medallia programs are C-suite sponsored and have over 1,000 active users each,” Busse said in a statement. “Medallia’s CEM solution, driven by our unparalleled data analytics platform, creates a powerful engine that wires the customer into every decision — at scale.”
Prior to Medallia, Busse led global customer success teams at Turn, a digital advertising company, and at Salesforce.com. He helped build Salesforce’s first partner ecosystem and oversaw the company’s consulting practice in the Asia-Pacific region.
“Bryan is a true SaaS customer success professional who, after contributing at Salesforce as its revenues tripled, has a proven track record in high growth environments,” said Borge Hald, co-founder and CEO of Medallia. “He’s extremely customer-centric and understands how to work closely with partners and delight customers. What also impresses me is that he is widely known for building and leading high performing teams.”
Distil Networks Raises $21M
Distil Networks, which provides bot detection and mitigation, announced this week that it has closed $21 million in Series C financing. The funding included participation from Silicon Valley Bank and existing venture investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Foundry Group and TechStars. The new round brings the San Francisco company's total funding to $65 million.
The company plans to use the investment to bolster global marketing and sales efforts, strengthen core offerings and double the current workforce over the next 12 to 18 months.
“As bots learn to better mimic human behavior and become harder to detect, solutions must innovate rapidly to thwart attacks,” Rami Essaid, CEO and co-founder of Distil Networks, said in a statement. “Our investors understand the enormous challenge that web properties face when it comes to defending proprietary information while maintaining a positive user experience, and they have chosen to support Distil in our pursuit to create a safer web.”
Acquia Releases Drupal Booster
Boston-based digital experience provider Acquia has released Acquia Lightning, a free open source distribution of Drupal that accelerates Drupal 8 development. Acquia officials call it a starter kit for Drupal 8, bringing together functionality for enterprise-scale delivery of digital experiences.
The Acquia Lightning distribution is available on Acquia Cloud Free, where developers can start building with Drupal 8.
Lightning includes:
- Drag-and-drop layout: Create responsive layouts so everyone can be a site builder and create pages and experiences without developer intervention
- Media management: Create, upload, embed and manage social media and digital assets
- Content workflow: Configure content workflows to streamline review and ensure editorial quality and add governance and control for publishing
- Experience preview: Conduct a review before publishing content, campaigns and cross-channel experiences
John Kennedy, product manager for Acquia Lightning, told CMSWire that developers building digital experiences in Drupal 8 can use Acquia Lightning as a framework to build high-quality experiences faster.
"They need to build a broad array of capabilities for each project," Kennedy said. "Acquia Lightning is the perfect starter kit. ... You may think developers create websites, but more often, they’re building authoring experiences. This is to facilitate the exploding user-base of content authors being born out the transition to digital. Online authoring isn’t what it used to be. Websites and digital experiences are ever more complex; they’re interactive, social, content-rich and must support a variety of different form factors."
The Acquia Lightning distribution is available to anyone on Acquia Cloud free. Acquia Lightning is also available for download from Drupal.org, GitHub, or using the Lighting Project template via the php CLI tool composer.
