Teradata Acquires eCircle For Social, Mobile Marketing Push

Teradata announced Wednesday a deal to acquire eCircle, a European digital messaging service provider. Based in Munich, eCircle is a privately held firm with about 1,000 customers and 400 employees, and it will be merged with Teradata's Aprimo unit, expanding that firm's geographic and services footprint.

"The idea is to build out our capabilities and extend our reach into the channels we've been trying to grow into around social, mobile, and the Web," Teradata CMO and executive VP Darryl McDonald told InformationWeek.

Like competitors Exact Target, Responsys, and Silverpop in North America and Emailvision in Europe, eCircle delivers digital messages--ads and marketing pitches--via email, social channels, and websites. Aprimo already had some of eCircle's capabilities, but Miller said eCircle's technology is both more mature and more capable.

"eCircle will take us deeper into mobile and social, and it also brings us content-creation and content-management capabilities," said Stephanie Miller, VP of digital messaging at Aprimo.

[ Want more on Teradata and Aprimo? Read Teradata Deal Signals 2011 Analytics Trend. ]

The content delivered and managed might include microsites, landing pages, point-of-collection websites, and other mechanisms for interacting with consumers. Of course, all the data generated in digital marketing campaigns has to be gathered and analyzed, and that's where Teradata comes in.

Teradata acquired Aprimo in December 2010 to gain access to deeper digital marketing capabilities, but the firm still operates as a standalone business. Teradata brings Aprimo into deals when companies aren't wedded to a particular digital marketing services firm. Similarly, Aprimo recommends Teradata when firms don't have data-management and analytics infrastructure already in place.

In the big-data-oriented digital marketing domain, Teradata's AsterData platform is geared to analyzing the multi-structured data that's typically encountered when analyzing e-mail, Web, and social media marketing campaigns. AsterData supports Hadoop-style MapReduce processing that's used in analysis of unstructured, text-oriented social media comment streams and profiles.

Teradata also has depth in analytics. Through a five-year-old partnership with SAS, for instance, the company last week introduced the Teradata 700 Appliance for SAS High-Performance Analytics. Purpose-built for the statistical analysis teams that develop models and customer segments, the appliance is said to tackle big data analysis that would take tens or even hundreds of hours on a conventional analytics server, within a matter of seconds.

In a marketing scenario, for example, analysts using SAS could take advantage of Teradata 700 speed to develop super-fine-grained customer segmentations and models to drive more responsive campaigns.

The financial details of Teradata's eCircle acquisition were not disclosed. The deal is expected to be completed within 60 days, pending European Union regulatory approval.

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