ARMONK, N.Y. and TAMPA, Fla., May 12, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- At its annual Smarter Commerce Global Summit event, IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced it has completed the acquisition of Silverpop, a privately held software company based in Atlanta, Ga. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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Silverpop empowers marketers with cloud-based capabilities that deliver personalized customer engagements that scale for any sized business. Silverpop's automated platform reduces the complexity of omnichannel marketing and makes it easier to personalize each customer interaction in real time. By providing deep customer insights and an intuitive engagement engine, Silverpop enables exceptional experiences for customers across the entire brand journey.

Silverpop extends IBM's leadership in marketing automation in both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) scenarios. With this acquisition, more than 8,000 organizations around the world now use IBM's Enterprise Marketing Management tools. Silverpop also adds to IBM's portfolio of more than 100 Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings that can be quickly deployed with little technical knowledge to accelerate time to value.

"Silverpop's powerful marketing automation capabilities will be infused across IBM's enterprise marketing portfolio to help organizations exceed expectations throughout the customer journey," said Kevin Bishop, Vice President, Customer Engagement Solutions, IBM. "This will allow IBM to make it easier for clients of any size to acquire, retain and maximize the lifetime value of their customers."

Silverpop makes personalization easier by automating the customer experience based on insights drawn from permission-based data streams -- such as social, web, email and mobile activity. Silverpop's powerful engagement and lead management platform enables marketers to use these profiles to deliver unique, highly personalized experiences for each customer in real time. For example:

    --  A retailer can determine that a customer who has repeatedly looked at a
        particular item on their website has just entered their local store,
        enabling the retailer to send an SMS message alerting the customer, if
        opted in, that this item is in stock and on sale in that particular
        store.
    --  A supplier can use a behavior-based scoring model to monitor buyer
        engagements from first inquiry through repeat purchase, while at the
        same time delivering personalized messages from the local sales
        representative about the preferences and position of the customer in the
        buying cycle.
    --  A packaged goods company can send personalized messages to their most
        loyal customers designed to be shared with their social networks, which
        helps generate positive brand awareness and increase reach when the
        customers rebroadcast that message to their followers.

IBM's growing ecosystem of more than 140 Ready for Smarter Commerce marketing partners will create an even more complete view of each customer by integrating data from these additional sources into Silverpop, enabling deeper customization.

Silverpop's cloud-based customer engagement solutions will be featured at IBM's Smarter Commerce Global Summit this week at the Tampa Bay Convention Center in Tampa, Fla. The event brings together nearly 4,000 business, technology and industry leaders to discuss how organizations can adopt a cloud-based, data-driven approach to enrich and deepen customer engagement. In addition to live product demonstrations, Silverpop experts will be speaking on topics such as "Delivering Real-Time Marketing" (Tuesday, May 13 from 4:30 - 5:30 pm, Room 4) and "Creating 1:1 Customer Experiences With Behavioral Marketing" (Wednesday, May 14 from 5:30 - 6:30 pm, Room 4). Learn more at www.ibm.com/software/commerce/summit/.

For more information on Silverpop, visit www.ibm.com/software/info/silverpop

Contact information:

Sean Audet
IBM Media Relations
spaudet@us.ibm.com
781.665.5213

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SOURCE IBM

SOURCE: IBM