Domande Frequenti / FAQs

The purpose of this document is to address questions and provide additional insight about Teradata and Aprimo’s intention to acquire eCircle. To view the full press release, please go to eCircle News.

News Overview

1. What is being announced today?

Teradata, the leading analytic data solutions company, and Aprimo, a Teradata company and the global leader in Integrated Marketing Management (IMM) software, are announcing the signing of a Definitive Agreement to acquire eCircle, the European leader in cloud-based digital marketing.

Once the acquisition is completed, eCircle will become part of Aprimo. eCircle’s current senior leadership team will join Aprimo and continue to serve key leadership roles. eCircle’s CEO Volker Wiewer will be joining both the Teradata EMEA Leadership team and the Aprimo Leadership Team as Vice President Aprimo EMEA. In this role, he will report to Hermann Wimmer, President of Teradata EMEA and Bob Boehnlein, President of Aprimo.

The completion of the transaction, which is subject to applicable regulatory clearances and other customary closing conditions, is expected to occur in the second quarter of 2012.

2. Who is eCircle? What do they do?

eCircle is widely considered to be the leading full-service digital marketing solutions provider in Europe.  The company provides cloud-based solutions for social, mobile, web and email marketing and offers digital marketing professional services including opt-in lead generation, content creation and email services.  Company headquarters are in Munich, Germany with offices in all major countries across Europe.

3. Who is Teradata? What do they do?

Teradata is the world's leading analytic data solutions company focused on integrated data warehousing, big data analytics, and business applications that provide actionable business intelligence. It delivers award-winning, integrated, purpose built platforms based on the most powerful, scalable, and reliable technology platform in the industry.

4. Who is Aprimo? What do they do?

Aprimo is an integrated marketing software and applications company and is part of Teradata Corporation, based in Dayton, Ohio. It provides business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) companies with on demand marketing software to manage several aspects of marketing including campaign management, lead management, brand management, e-mail marketing, event management, performance management, social marketing, spend management, and workflow & project management.  The company is the first recognized industry leader in Marketing Resource Management (MRM) and the first recognised visionary in Enterprise Marketing Management.

5. Why is Teradata acquiring eCircle?

eCircle’s digital marketing applications will enhance Aprimo’s Integrated Marketing Management strategy and enable marketers to deliver highly targeted, consistent and personalised campaigns that are integrated across all channels.

This acquisition will also extend Aprimo’s current IMM Solutions, and will position Aprimo as an even stronger leader in digital marketing. It will synergistically broaden the addressable customer base, accelerate growth, and fuel innovation for both Aprimo and eCircle customers. 

The joining together of eCircle and Aprimo will add expertise and reach in all major European countries, creating the largest marketing applications provider in Europe and enabling the delivery of eCircle solutions globally.

6. What is the value for Teradata? How does this map to their business strategy?

The addition of eCircle to Aprimo and Teradata fits with Teradata’s strategic focus to provide the industry-leading data warehousing, big data analytics and integrated marketing management solutions on premise or in the cloud. Specifically, the acquisition maps to Teradata’s strategy in three ways:

1. Integrated Marketing Management (IMM) is one of Teradata’s three strategic market opportunities, and Teradata continues to invest in cloud-based IMM – where Aprimo is the leader
 
2. This move also enhances Teradata’s big data analytics strategy.  Marketing organisations remain key to helping corporations better understand, retain and grow their customer base, and marketing is the entity helping lead the growth of big data analytics, as marketers look to gain greater customer insight by analysing all data types.

3. Digital marketing -- comprising social, web, mobile and email -- is a critical component of Aprimo’s IMM solutions, and the acquisition of eCircle positions Aprimo as a leader in digital marketing.

7. What is Digital Marketing and why is it important?

Consumers today are increasingly interacting with brands across digital channels: social, mobile, web and email.  These channels empower marketers to deliver highly targeted and personalised campaigns integrated across all channels.  According to a recent Forrester*  report digital marketing represents one of the largest and most strategic areas of investment for most companies and is a critical focus for marketers and is expected to grow to $16 Billion by 2016.

8. How will eCircle fit into Teradata?

Upon close, eCircle and Aprimo will become integrated, maintaining its current business operations and fully supporting its customer base.  Once the acquisition is final, eCircle’s CEO Volker Wiewer and his current senior leadership team will continue serving key roles within both Teradata EMEA and Aprimo.
Technology

9. How will eCircle’s software and services fit with Aprimo’s solutions?

eCircle will accelerate Aprimo’s digital marketing strategy as part of a powerful and integrated Campaign Management offering.  Customers will be able to leverage big data analytics to deliver highly targeted and personalised campaigns across all channels, and will be able to access all of their marketing applications -- including digital, campaign and operational marketing applications -- via the cloud.

Combining eCircle with Aprimo offers several important benefits: 

1. Faster acceleration of both organisation’s  roadmaps for email and digital marketing – a critical component to our overall multi-channel campaign management strategy,

2. Global presence with more than 1000 employees in the core marketing applications business.

3. Teradata, Aprimo and eCircle in combination will have a strong competitive edge in the digital marketing business because clients will be able to leverage big data insights across the complete marketing value chain. 

10. Why eCircle versus other digital marketing/email marketing vendors?

Three reasons:  Culture, Quality and Vision.
 
1. eCircle has the same kind of customer-focused, employee-empowered culture as Teradata and Aprimo, and  all three organisations are known as a great place to work.

2. eCircle’s solutions are well known to be high quality and high performance.

3. eCircle is the leading digital marketing provider in Europe, and will allow Aprimo to accelerate progress against its product development roadmap. In short, it’s a perfect fit from both the product strategy, and marketplace vision standpoints.

11. Will eCircle continue implementing its current product roadmap?

Both companies will continue with their normal course of business until the acquisition closes. Once that happens, there will be some work over the next few months to integrate the respective product strategy and roadmaps together. The good news is that there is already a lot of synergy. 

12. How soon will eCircle be integrated with Aprimo?

Both companies will continue with their normal course of business until the acquisition closes. Once that happens, planning will begin and we will provide an update.

13. Will this change the roadmap for Aprimo solutions?

Both companies will continue with their normal course of business until the acquisition closes. Once that happens, planning will begin and we will provide an update.

14. Will we continue to support the existing eCircle applications and current Aprimo solutions?

We plan to continue to develop, innovate and support all eCircle and Aprimo solutions as we develop a joint roadmap to integrate eCircle into Aprimo’s IMM suite.  Both Aprimo and eCircle eCircle customers stand to benefit as we combine the best of both digital marketing solutions.

Customers and Partners

15. How will eCircle’s customers benefit from the acquisition?

eCircle customers will continue to benefit from eCircle’s technology as well as from the extended resources of Teradata. As eCircle is integrated into Aprimo, eCircle customers will have the opportunity to take advantage of Aprimo’s Integrated Marketing Solutions for campaign management and marketing operations – extending the products and services available to them to help drive their strategic marketing efforts. 

16. How will Aprimo’s customers benefit from this acquisition?

Digital marketing is a critical revenue driver for today’s marketers.  Adding eCircle’s solutions to Aprimo’s portfolio will help customers deliver highly targeted, consistent and personalised campaigns through multi-channel digital marketing. The addition of eCircle also adds over 350 people focused on digital marketing to the Aprimo team, which will benefit customers with faster innovation, time to market, and access to deeper best practices expertise.

17. How will business partners benefit?

Both eCircle and Aprimo will continue to proactively expand strategic partnerships and build a partner ecosystem that will enable us to deliver enterprise class IMM solutions to and through our partners.

* Forrester report titled Revisiting the Online Marketing Suite, February 2011.