Adobe

has announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire

Neolane

 for approximately $600 million in cash, with the aim to extend leadership in digital marketing.

Neolane integrates online and offline marketing data from across an brand – performing audience segmentation and delivering marketing messages across channels.

The Paris-based firm offers a platform for sophisticated automation and execution of campaigns across web, email, social, mobile, call center, direct mail and point of sale (POS). This enables marketers to deliver consistent customer experiences, personalised campaigns and increased ROI.

Neolane will become a sixth solution in the Adobe Marketing Cloud, complementing the existing analytics, target, social, experience manager and media optimiser offerings.

Brad Rencher

, senior vice president and general manager of Adobe’s Digital Marketing business said: “The acquisition of Neolane brings critical cross-channel campaign management capabilities to the Adobe Marketing Cloud.

“Adobe has long been the trusted partner to creative professionals and we are now extending our lead in the digital marketing space with the addition of Neolane. From campaign creation through planning, execution and optimization, Adobe technology is driving the entire marketing  process.”

Gerry Brown

, senior analyst at

Ovum

, commented on the news: “This was an expensive acquisition at over 10 times Neolane’s previous year’s revenues, but it should be worth it.

“The deal has the potential to propel Adobe into the market leadership with both its existing digital (website centric) offer, plus Neolane’s enterprise campaign management offer. These are the two driving forces of strategic enterprise purchasing of digital marketing platforms today, and so puts Adobe in a strong market position.

“Clearly a catalyst for this acquisition was

Salesforce.com’s recent $2.5 billion purchase of Exact Target.

Industry talk suggests that both Exact Target and

Eloqua

(which was acquired by

Oracle

in December 2012) were acquisition targets for Adobe, and Adobe was likely compelled to act before all the their campaign management best-of-breed vendor acquisition options evaporated.”