Marketo, Tableau File For IPOs

As the season turns to spring, a young company's fancy turns to thoughts of cold, hard cash. Or so it would seem, given that two up-and-coming technology providers, Marketo and Tableau Software, separately filed for long-planned initial public offerings on Tuesday.

Marketo provides cloud-based marketing automation applications, a hot category made all the hotter by recent acquisitions including Oracle's $871 million February acquisition of Eloqua, Marketo's biggest rival.

Marketo has seen rapid growth since its founding in 2007. Revenue climbed from $14 million in 2010 to $32 million in 2011 and $58 million in 2012, according to the company's S-1 SEC filing.

Marketo expects to raise $75 million through the IPO, with the war chest going towards expanding the marketing application portfolio and increasing sales and marketing firepower. The company previously raised $108 million in venture capital, and as of the end of 2012 it had an accumulated deficit of $82.2 million.

[ What's behind increasing marketing tech investment? Read Why CMO Tech Spending Is Good For IT. ]

Marketo has some 2,000 customers, including Capgemini, Citrix, General Electric, Medtronic, Moody's and Symantec. Its applications are heavily focused on business-to-business marketing, with functionality including lead and pipeline management and reporting, and social and email campaign management.

Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse are leading Marketo's offering, and the company's stock will trade under the symbol "MKTO" on the Nasdaq exchange.

Tableau Software is decidedly not a cloud-based company, as it focuses almost entirely on desktop and server-based on-premises software. Nonetheless, the 10-year-old company has been one of the fastest-growing vendors in the business intelligence and analytics market, winning accolades for its easy-to-use data visualization software and successfully breaking into the emerging big data market. The company's most direct competitors are QlikTech and Tibco Spotfire.

Tableau had revenue of $34 million in 2010, $62 million in 2011 and $127 million in 2012, according to the company's S-1 filing . It expects to raise as much as $150 million through its IPO. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are leading the IPO, and the company expects to trade under the symbol "DATA" on the New York Stock Exchange.

Enterprise software companies have fared well in public offerings during the past year. Big data software vendor Splunk, for example, raised $230 million through its April 2012 IPO, and its stock price closed near $40 per share on Tuesday, more than double the opening price of $17. Cloud-based enterprise apps vendor Workday raised $685 million through an IPO in October, and its stock price closed near $62 per share on Tuesday, well above its IPO opening price of $28.