Adobe on Thursday confirmed it would fold the planning, engagement and measurement capabilities of Marketo into its Experience Cloud following a $4.75 billion acquisition it said will offer the integrated toolset B2B marketers want.

The company said Marketo CEO Steve Lucas will join Adobe’s Digital Experience business, which will become the home to Marketo’s technology and team. The move comes little more than two years since Marketo, formerly a public company, was bought by Vista Equity Partners for $1.8 billion.

In May, Adobe had made a similar move towards enterprise customers when it bought commerce provider Magento for $1.8 billion.

In a conference call with investors and analysts, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen noted that the company’s growth to date has largely been in consumer-oriented firms working in sectors such as retail, financial services and travel. However he said joint customers were looking for greater integration between the two vendors. 

“Increasingly our platform is also being adopted by B2B and B2B2C customers who face many of the same marketing challenges,” he said. “When we looked at what we had with the Experience Cloud, we recognized the engagement with these customers is critical and it’s increasingly digital . . . (Marketo) complements everything we have with Adobe Campaign.”

Brad Rencher, Adobe’s executive vice-president and general manager, Digital Experience, said adding Marketo will bring the company greater capabilities to assist businesses pursuing account-based marketing (ABM), improve campaign creation and execution and deliver cross-channel experiences that are personalized and consistent.

“When businesses buy from other business, they now have the same high expectations as consumers,” he said. “What we really see is the opportunity to connect much more closely to the core revenue flows of a B2B business.”

 According to G2Crowd, the most common alternatives to Marketo include HubSpot, Act-On Software and Salesforce’s Pardot. Those firms tend to have some tools that doesn’t, such as CRM and customer service applications, but Narayen dismissed that as a concern. 

“It’s less about going in (to a B2B customer) against another offering and more about going in with a more unified offering,” Narayen said.

Adobe’s current Experience Cloud handles everything from content creation and personalization to advertising, commerce and analytics. Some analysts on social media were quick to recognize that Experience Cloud could become more valuable to enterprise firms by integrating with Marketo’s applications, which handle things like lead generation.

MyPOV: it shows that @adobe is now serious about #B2B marketing. #df18 https://t.co/GN4ANbWvDg

— R “Ray” Wang 王瑞光 #1A #AI (@rwang0) September 20, 2018

Others in the B2B agency side sounded less confident about the combination, pointing to similar M&As in the martech space and the differences between the two firms.

Time to see if Adobe does to Marketo what Oracle did to Eloqua. #marketo

— Brian Hansford (@remarkmarketing) September 20, 2018

Adobe buying Marketo is kind of like cheeseburgers buying hamburgers.

— Todd Belcher (@toddmetrics) September 14, 2018

Some of Marketo’s marquee customers include Palo Alto Networks, J.P. Morgan and Workday. Executives suggested more details on the acquisition would be available at Adobe’s MAX creativity conference that takes place in Los Angeles next month. 

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