Demand Gen Report

Vidcaster, a provider of video marketing solutions, has announced an integration with Marketo that enables users to capture and score lead behavior with any video player embedded on a web site and funnel that data into Marketo’s marketing automation platform.

The Vidcaster Leadwall enables users to tailor their video gate to generate lead data that is automatically streamed into Marketo activity logs. This data can be used to trigger nurture campaigns, impact lead scores and ultimately deliver detailed data to their CRM to optimize their ongoing sales process.

Industry observers speculate that Salesforce.com is taking a more adversarial stance toward some competing marketing automation vendors in the wake of its announced plans to acquire ExactTarget. Marketo was slated to have a booth and a speaking slot at a Salesforce customer event last week in New York, but they did not have a presence. Silverpop was the only marketing automation vendor to have a booth at the event.

Sources told Demand Gen Report that Marketo was excluded from the event because of a conflict over some recent unspecified comments made by Marketo officials, but the friction has been resolved. Marketo is expected to be involved in a Toronto event this Wednesday, according to Salesforce officials.

Marketo and Eloqua are no longer listed on the SFDC AppExchange, although HubSpot remains on the exchange.

B2B companies are increasingly adopting e-Commerce as a means of marketing and selling their products and services, according to a BtoB Magazine report titled: “The Emerging Role of B-to-B E-commerce.” The online survey was sponsored by SAP’s Ariba, Inc. and conducted in March and April with more than 220 marketers. According to Forrester Research, B2B e-Commerce transactions within the U.S. exceed $550 billion annually.

More than 30% of B2B marketers are “strong” or “complete” adopters of e-Commerce, in comparison to the 25% from last year. With only 15% of marketers currently avoiding e-Commerce entirely, BtoB predicts that by 2014 40% of B2B marketers expect to be as committed to e-Commerce as a means of marketing and selling.

Just a week after spending $2.5 billion on ExactTarget, Salesforce has acquired business intelligence and analytics startup EdgeSpring. The details of the deal were not disclosed.

"Business intelligence and analytics in the enterprise is massively painful and IMHO still largely an unsolved problem today," Vijay Chakravarthy, EdgeSpring CEO, posted on the company's web site. “Being a part of Salesforce.com will give us a tremendous opportunity to take our technology to the next level and deliver truly amazing innovation to solve this high value problem.”