Chicago-based Aprimo is getting new life under an old name — and refocusing on its mission to "help CMOs be smarter marketers and raise their value inside their organizations."
That's the word from John Stammen, CEO of the marketing operations software maker, who argues that most marketers are still working in the dark despite the many advances in marketing technology. "In the digital world there are more opportunities but also more complexity,” he said.
Stammen brushed off competitors like Marketo, Oracle's Eloqua, Salesforce's Pardot and Adobe, saying their "point solutions" fall short of Aprimo's capabilities to manage everything marketers need to plan, execute and measure the effectiveness of their campaigns.
Aprimo Reclaims its Name
Founded 14 years ago, Aprimo quickly gained recognition as a Gartner-rated Marketing Resource Management (MRM) and Multi-channel Campaign Management (MCCM) Leader. Teradata, a provider of data warehouse platforms, software and services, acquired the company in 2011 for $525 million and made it part of its Marketing Applications unit.
In July, Marlin Equity Partners acquired both Teradata Marketing Applications for $90 million and Revenew, a provider of through-channel and distributed marketing solutions. Marlin restored the Aprimo name and brought in Stammen — an executive vice president at Aprimo before being named CEO of Revenew — to run the company.
"Teradata is a great company, but it stepped out of its zone going after marketing. It didn't understand the DNA," Stammen said.
Under Teradata's leadership, the company now known as Aprimo lost market value and some customers, too. "We are delighted to once again be an independent organization," Stammen said, citing customer retention, acquisition and growing value as his top objectives. The company is also promising to roll out more than 300 features and benefits to its customers next year.
300 Enhancements via the Cloud
In addition to its name, Aprimo has reclaimed many former managers and employees who have long-standing relationships with customers.
Earlier this week, Stammen and other Aprimo executives gathered with 12 of the company's financial services customers who are responsible for a combined $2 billion in marketing spend. This group runs 5,000 programs, 125,000 activities, 200 activity types, 70,000 projects, 800 workflows and have 1,120 suppliers connected to workflow activities.
"They all said they couldn't do it without Aprimo," Stammen said.
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As a result, Aprimo has put in writing its promise to deliver more than 300 new enhancements via its cloud platform. Most will center around user experience, business intelligence and APIs around things like digital asset management.
Going Local Across All Channels
Aprimo has already added other innovations since becoming an independent company. There is a marketing campaign solution that allows marketers to access on-premises customer data according to specified fields (like zip codes) and then create digital campaigns around them without having to move the data to the cloud.
"Marketo and Adobe can't do that,"said Stammen, noting that at big companies the data is too heavy to move.
There is also a distributed content platform solution that enables brands to co-market solutions with local dealers. Companies like Microsoft, for example, can fund the campaigns and create co-branded content, which Aprimo can then push out across selected channels — more than 100,000 of them in Microsoft's case.
The brands can also push leads to local channels and measure the results of their efforts, Stammen said.
Stammen told CMSWire Aprimo pioneered the marketing operations industry 14 years ago. And now, "we're back," he said, sounding neither boastful nor humble but simply eager to help his company reclaim its place in the market.
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