Dive Brief:

• IBM on Wednesday announced that it will acquire Silverpop, a move that boosts its enterprise marketing portfolio with award-winning marketing automation and real-time personalization.
• Silverpop offers cloud-based services for personalized customer engagement in both the B2B and B2C spaces.
• The move will also expand IBM's client base, with major companies like Mazda, Stonyfield Farm, and Advanced Micro Devices among the 8,000 organizations it will now serve worldwide.

Dive Insight:

With over 100 software-as-a-service offerings, IBM was already recognized as a world leader in marketing automation tech, but picking up Silverpop further cements that position. Silverpop's platform has been lauded as being easy to use and requiring little technical knowledge, and it can automate personalized engagement based on real-time customer profiles built from permission-based data from social, web, email, and mobile use. 

The financial terms of the deal, which is expected to close during Q2, haven't been disclosed.