Aprimo gets back on its feet with first major platform update since Teradata spinoff

In 2010, data warehouse/analytics provider Teradata bought marketing software company Aprimo, to help jump-start its integrated marketing solutions.

In late 2015, Teradata sold its Marketing Applications unit, which had been built around Aprimo, to a private equity firm. Teradata kept the Customer Interaction Manager component but divested itself of the marketing resource management and campaign management capabilities.

In July of last year, the private equity firm — Marlin Equity Partners — announced it was merging the newly acquired Aprimo with another firm it had recently acquired, channel marketing provider Revenew.

“Aprimo is back,” Aprimo CEO John Stammen — former head of Revenew — told news media at the time, adding that the focus would be on marketing operations, including marketing planning, content creation, data storage, campaign management and distributed marketing through channel providers.

This week, the Chicago-based Aprimo announced its first major platform update since it split from Teradata. The updates themselves are modest, but they point toward Aprimo’s intentions as an independent company, which took effect on July 1.

There are now more APIs and a new web services capability; the latter enables real-time customizing of business intelligence reports from Aprimo’s underlying knowledge base. Previously, users had to export the data for reports.

And there are additional social capabilities for communicating with team members during annotation efforts, as well as the abilities to perform side-by-side annotations of documents and to mark up video files. Here’s a screen shot showing some of the new social-ness:

These enhancements are designed to bolster the platform’s position inside an enterprise’s landscape of tools and its role as the central marketing management tool.

Aprimo’s capabilities include budgeting, marketing planning, content and campaign management — including creative briefs, workflow, collaboration and an asset library — as well as providing a portal for channel partners and enabling the segmentation of audiences.

The platform, Senior Director of Product Marketing and Strategy Michael Lummus told me, is focused on what’s happening and how it’s performing “from ideas [up till] execution.”

“Most marketing departments don’t have their ducks in a row,” he said.

Aprimo, which does not include a customer relationship management system, works with an execution platform, such as an email service provider or a marketing automation platform.

CMOs, for instance, might use Aprimo to segment targeted audiences, create mobile marketing campaigns and manage budget, workflow and resources.

Lummus noted that, partly during the time when Aprimo was part of Teradata, his company’s competitors in marketing operations/resource management were absorbed by other companies, such as Unica by IBM in 2010.

At this point, he acknowledged. “there are some single-pint solutions to manage marketing workflow or budget.”

But, he said, the once-again-independent Aprimo is “the only enterprise-level, standalone, marketing operations management firm that’s focused on end-to-end marketing,” and the new updates “help to solidify” that position with its blue-chip customer base.

[Article on MarTech Today.]

About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.