ExactTarget, one of the larger players in email marketing is preparing to bring the company onto the Stock Market. As they have filed their S-1 for an IPO (initial public offering) to raise as much as $100 million. This means that we can have a look into ExactTargets numbers of this and last years. The IPO info didn’t offer any big surprises.

In 2007 the company filed for an earlier IPO of up to $86.25 million. It later withdrew the offering in May 2009 citing “continued weakness and uncertainty in the equity and credit markets”, meaning the financial crisis.

ExactTarget as one of the larger SaaS companies has seen impressive growth for the last 43 consecutive months. The move to the stockmarket is in line with the trend of other email service providers and SaaS suppliers going public.

For the first nine months of 2011, hitting $148 milion in revenue. The net loss was up to $29.3 mn.

There’s a reason for this loss. ‘ExactTarget has been investing. Mainly on innovation, building market share and expanding overseas.’ according to IBJ. ExactTarget has made three acquisitions in the last two years: mPath, cotweet and Keymail marketing. It also added 500 employees and launched their email marketing operations in the UK and Australia.

Some interesting ExactTarget as seen in the ExactTarget IPO

A direct client base of over 4,600 organizations

• More than 500 reselling marketing service providers
• 1100 employees
• $40 million annual R&D investment in 2011
• Two third-party data centers in Indianapolis and Las Vegas
• Professional services are available for training, implementation, integration, deliverability, campaign services and strategic consulting
• 401 employees in sales and marketing

Clients of ExactTarget

Those are some impressive numbers. ExactTarget adds that their revenue is distributed across clients ranging from enterprises to small businesses in numerous industries, including retail and e-commerce, media and entertainment, travel and hospitality, financial services and insurance, technology, daily-deal and flash-sale and marketing service providers. Where no client represented more than 5% of revenue.

It’s quite interesting that they named daily deal sites seperately, as those have been seeing huge growth in the last year. Groupon had it’s own IPO as the flagship of the daily deals companies, but recieved some heavy comments as to their (inflated and sustainable) worth.

ExactTarget, an Indianapolis-based provider of cross-channel interactive marketing solutions, announced last week that it filed a registration statement with the SEC relating to a proposed IPO. The number of shares and the price range have not been determined.

Battery Ventures, founded in 1983, has raised $4 billion since inception and is investing BV IX, a $750 million fund. General partner Tom Crotty has sole voting and dispositive power over the shares held in ExactTarget.

From ExactTarget’s S-1 registration statement:

Shares Beneficially Owned Prior to this Offering						Shares Beneficially Owned After this Offering
Name of Beneficial Owner	Number				Percentage		Number		Percentage
5% Stockholders:
Entities affiliated with Technology Crossover Ventures(1)		7,218,594				25.8
Entities affiliated with Greenspring Associates(2)		4,990,506				17.8
Entities affiliated with Battery Ventures(3)		4,904,106				17.5
Scale Venture Partners III, L.P.(4)		1,997,687				7.1

 

Monetate, a leader in personalized web experiences, has now delivered over six billion experiences for retail brands like Dick’s Sporting Goods and Urban Outfitters. You can watch a video clip about the platform here. I recently had the chance to talk with Blair Lyon, Vice President of Marketing with Monetate, about the platform and trends in the space.

Kristina: Monetate has created 6+billion customer experiences for clients; can you give me some highlights of what you’ve done?
Blair: We’ve seen some outstanding results to date. Here are a couple of specific examples:

• One way Urban Outfitters leverages our testing, targeting and personalization solution is to optimize its personalized product recommendations, which has resulted in a 2% lift in revenue and a 1% increase in conversion. While those might not sound like huge percentages, on an ecommerce website of Urban’s size, improvements like that can translate into a six figure monthly revenue increase and many millions of dollars in incremental revenue per year.

• Earlier this year, Western wear retailer Sheplers (No. 290 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide) worked with us to experiment with free shipping…After four days of testing the various shipping offers, Sheplers enjoyed a 57% increase to top line revenue and a 48% increase in new customer acquisition. Conversions increased 10% in the first test, and 6% in the second, with the free shipping offer encouraging customers who had selected items to complete their purchases. Since beginning to work with Monetate for testing earlier this year, Sheplers has seen a 3.33% increase in its overall website conversion rate.

Kristina: What impact does personalization have on ecommerce?

Blair: Creating a one-to-one customer experience contributes significantly to customers that are more highly engaged, which in turn has a direct impact on the merchant’s bottom line. For example, if a website visitor receives messages that are not relevant to them – like offers for patio furniture when they are visiting from a cold climate – they are more likely to leave your site for one of your competitors. [Online] retailers can more effectively reach different segments of customers with targeted messaging and promotions tailored to each customer group (women vs. men; new customers vs. returning shoppers; etc.).

ExactTarget Inc. filed plans to raise up to $100 million through an initial public offering as the email marketing company looks to raise funds for general corporate purposes.

ExactTarget provides marketing applications that are built on a cloud-based platform and help organizations communicate with customers through email, mobile phones, social media and websites. The company operates through annual and multi-year subscriptions.

The company’s loss in 2010 widened to $12.1 million from $2 million a year earlier before the payment of preferred dividends, as operating expenses rose 61%. Revenue grew 41%.

ExactTarget said it plans to use the proceeds of the offering for general corporate purposes, such as expanding its sales and marketing teams, international operations, product development and working capital. The company said it may use cash or shares of its common stock to make acquisitions or invest in other businesses, products or technologies.

The company said it hasn’t yet determined the number of shares to be offered or the price range for the offering. The company didn’t indicate which exchange it plans to apply to list its share on or its symbol.

Monetate, the leading provider of testing, targeting and personalization solutions for websites, today announced that it has been chosen by AlwaysOn as one of the Venture Summit Mid-Atlantic 100 winners.

The Venture Summit Mid-Atlantic 100 recognizes companies that exhibit leadership among its peers and innovative approaches and technologies that are likely to disrupt existing markets and entrenched players. Monetate was specially selected by the AlwaysOn editorial team and industry experts spanning the globe based on a set of five criteria: innovation, market potential, commercialization, stakeholder value, and media buzz.

Monetate and the other Venture Summit Mid-Atlantic 100 companies will be honored at the IMPACT Venture Summit Mid-Atlantic event, November 29th and 30th, 2011, at the Ritz Carlton in Philadelphia, PA.

Monetate has experienced rapid growth including a 387% increase in revenue during the first three quarters of 2011, when compared to the same period last year. Significant enterprise adoption of Monetate’s platform, exhibited by a 300% increase in total customers over the last 12 months, has fueled the rapid expansion of Monetate’s business which allows marketers to design and run multiple concurrent messaging and promotional campaigns on their websites, while simultaneously testing them in real time.

“We’re pleased to be selected as one of AlwaysOn’s Venture Summit Mid-Atlantic 100 winners,” said Monetate CEO David Brussin. “Our outstanding growth is a direct result of our technology innovations that allow organizations to insert new levels of agility into the marketing workflow and easily change anything on their websites for any customer, at any time.”

“The Venture Summit Mid-Atlantic 100 winners are transforming the mid-Atlantic region’s technology community through innovation and creativity,” said Tony Perkins, founder and editor at AlwaysOn. “The companies represent some of the highest-growth opportunities in the mid-Atlantic private company marketplace across all industry sectors, including digital media and entertainment, on-demand computing as well as greentech and the life sciences.”

A full list of all the Venture Summit Mid-Atlantic 100 winners can be found on the AlwaysOn website at:

http://www.aonetwork.com/AOStory/Announcing-2011-Venture-Summit-Mid-Atlantic-100-Top-Private-Companies

About Monetate

Monetate is the leading provider of testing, targeting, and personalization solutions for websites. The company’s cloud based platform empowers marketers to test and target product offers and site features and convert successful tests into personalized messaging and promotional campaigns, instantly, anywhere on the website. Monetate removes the IT bottleneck and is quick and easy to install using just a single JavaScript tag, inserted only once, and requiring no internal IT resources. Some of the best known brands in the world use Monetate to make the most of their online marketing dollars, increase conversion rates, and personalize the website experience including Best Buy, Aeropostale, Urban Outfitters, Altrec, The Sports Authority, PETCO, QVC and more. Based in Philadelphia, Monetate serves a growing list of B2C websites around the world. For more information about Monetate, visit http://www.monetate.com.

About AlwaysOn

AlwaysOn is the leading business media brand networking the Global Silicon Valley. AlwaysOn helped ignite the social media revolution in early 2003 when it launched the AlwaysOn network. In 2004, it became the first media brand to socially network its online readers and event attendees. AlwaysOn’s preeminent executive event series includes the Silicon Valley Innovation Summit, OnMedia, OnHollywood, Venture Summit Mid-Atlantic, OnDemand, Venture Summit Silicon Valley, OnMobile, and GoingGreen Silicon Valley. The AlwaysOn network and live event series continue to lead the industry by empowering its readers, event participants, sponsors, and advertisers like no other media brand.

Cloud computing is an emerging paradigm computing concept that enables both information technology infrastructure and software to be delivered directly over the Internet as a service.

This arrangement, whereby companies can expand network capacity, and run applications directly on a vendor’s network, offers a host of advantages with the most primary being radically lower IT costs. The lower budgetary requirements and commitments allow even smaller companies to piece together an IT project without spending on purchasing legacy server, and storage systems. Additionally, the burden of developing and maintaining the technological expertise required in running the network is transferred to the service provider. The pay-per-use basis of cloud computing helps transform the way IT departments create and deploy customized applications during these difficult times. By offering a more cost-effective, less risky, and fundamentally faster alternative to on-site application developments, cloud computing is poised to transform the economics of information technology in the next few years.

With the Internet being a foundation for cloud computing, the term “cloud” is used as a metaphor for the Internet. Thanks to new and improved networks, the Internet is fast emerging into vehicle for delivering computational requirements. The ubiquity of the Internet and the widespread availability of high-speed broadband access are the primary factors driving the movement towards the cloud. Although still a small percentage of the total IT spends, cloud services are strong drivers of incremental growth.

The recent economic recession saw hordes of companies take to cloud computing as a cost saving strategy.Cloud computing came as a boon for companies during tough economic and financial climate, given that the technology can potentially slash IT costs by over 35%. The bad economy fed the global cloud computing services market as cash, and revenue starved companies prowled for IT solutions that are cost-effective, require minimum to zero investments, and low management of computing resources. Technically, the feature of multi-tenancy, or the ability to scale up or scale down services on demand, makes fiscal sense in tough economic climate. And with cloud computing fitting the bill in every respect, the business case for the technology stands exemplified. In short, recession became the push factor, which tripped the market into the mass adoption stage.

As the world economy navigates its way through recession and towards recovery, organizations will still retain their appetite for cost effective solutions, but will however demand more value-creating productivity. Against this backdrop, cloud computing stands poised for post recession boom. Shifting priorities among limited budgetary constraints will make it critical for market participants to closely follow spending patterns to understand areas where companies will be spending their precious funds. Given the fact that cloud computing services help companies scale up or scale down their computing requirements and resources through public, private and hybrid clouds, the value proposition offered is overwhelming. Companies that will consume the most cloud services are expected to be those operating in a commoditized business environment where constant product differentiation is a perennial need.

Growing recognition of economic and operational benefits and the efficiency of cloud-computing model promise strong future growth. As companies ease out gradually from the economic uncertainties and financial shackles, widespread adoption of cloud services is in the offing. The pragmatic and successful adoption of this technology concept by early adopters will pave the way for mass enterprise adoption of cloud services in the upcoming years. The transition of enterprises from virtual machines to the cloud will additionally extend the impetus required for strong growth. Poised to score the maximum gains will be end-to end cloud-computing solutions that offer complete functionalities ranging from integration of internal and external clouds, automation of business critical tasks, and streamlining of business processes and workflow, among others.

Future growth in the market will be primarily driven by growing adoption of enterprise mobility as a key IT strategy among new age companies. With most of the modern business houses exploring opportunities globally, business operations in recent years are moving beyond corporate boundary walls. Global mobile worker population is also expected grow at a considerable pace in the coming years. Given the need for mobile workforce to constantly remain in touch with corporate headquarters and access business information even when away, the demand for productivity solutions such as collaboration and communications suites, IM, document sharing e-mail, and Web conferencing, which are hosted on the cloud but are accessible to a mobile workforce via browser on mobile devices, is growing at a robust pace.

Growth in the market will also be driven by the need for companies to ensure business continuity. With most businesses perceiving traditional in-house data backup infrastructure as insufficient in safeguarding critical corporate data from system failures, theft, vandalism, floods and fire, offsite backup infrastructure are magnetizing enormous interest and investments. Against this backdrop, cloud computing and web hosted storage plus backup options are increasing in popularity as companies’ race to online vaulting service providers to hedge the risks associated with the unknown future. Cloud computing, as a low cost alternative to traditional data backup storage options, is emerging into a viable option for business continuity and disaster data recovery management for both small-medium and large-sized businesses. Growth in the cloud computing market will also be driven by growing adoption of technology among small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Charmed by the prospect of gaining access to such high-end technologies, whose adoption until recently were largely limited to huge multinationals with strong financial muscle, SMEs have been increasing their investments on cloud computing.

As stated by the new market research report on Cloud Computing Services, the United States remains the largest regional market worldwide. Asia-Pacific is one of the fastest growing regional markets for cloud computing services, with revenues from the region waxing at a CAGR of about 35% over the analysis period. Growth in the Asia-Pacific market will be especially driven by the accelerated pace of developments in the enterprise sector, especially in emerging markets such as China and India, and the need for efficient solutions to deliver IT services.Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) represents the fastest growing market segment by service type.

Key players in this marketplace include Akamai Technologies Inc., Amazon Web Services LLC, CA Technologies, Dell Inc., ENKI, Flexiant Ltd., Google Inc., Hewlett-Packard Development Company L.P., IBM Corporation, Joyent Inc., KloudData Inc., Layered Technologies Inc., Microsoft Corporation, Netsuite Inc., Novell Inc., OpSource Inc., Oracle Corporation, Rackspace Hosting Inc., Red Hat Inc., Salesforce.com Inc., Skytap Inc., Terremark Worldwide Inc., Yahoo! Inc., among others.

The research report titled “Cloud Computing Services: A Global Strategic Business Report” announced by Global Industry Analysts, Inc., provides a review of noteworthy market trends, growth drivers and challenges. The report in addition also enumerates recent acquisitions, and other strategic industry activities. The report offers demand estimates and projections for world Cloud Computing Services market by service verticals, Software as a Service (SaaS); Platform as a Service (PaaS); and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Key geographic markets analyzed in the report include the US, Canada, Japan, Europe (France, Germany, Italy, UK, Spain, Russia and Rest of Europe), Asia-Pacific (Australia, China, India, South Korea and Rest of Asia-Pacific), Latin America (Brazil, and Rest of Latin America), and Rest of World.

For more details about this comprehensive market research report, please visit –http://www.strategyr.com/Cloud_Computing_Services_Market_Report.asp

About Global Industry Analysts, Inc.

Global Industry Analysts, Inc., (GIA) is a leading publisher of off-the-shelf market research. Founded in 1987, the company currently employs over 800 people worldwide. Annually, GIA publishes more than 1300 full-scale research reports and analyzes 40,000+ market and technology trends while monitoring more than 126,000 Companies worldwide. Serving over 9500 clients in 27 countries, GIA is recognized today, as one of the world’s largest and reputed market research firms.

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Telephone: 408-528-9966
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Email: press(at)StrategyR(dot)com
Web Site: http://www.StrategyR.com/

Exacttarget, Inc reported today in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission it had raised $40M in new funding. Companies file this special form with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in the majority of cases when closing new funding.

Exacttarget, Inc did not disclose revenue figures according to the SEC Filing detailing the transaction. The type of investment being offered was listed as equity (opposed to debt, warrants, or other types of investment options). Exacttarget, Inc noted they began raising the money on November 10, 2011. As of today, the entire $40M offering has been sold to private investors, no remaining investment is being sought at this time.

Digging into Exacttarget, Inc’s fundraising history, Exacttarget, Inc has filed 3 fundraising documents with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Their last filing with the SEC on March 1, 2010 noted $8.1M in new investment. Previous to this filing, Exacttarget, Inc had a $70M fund raise on November 18, 2009.

The SEC Filing can be viewed in its entirety by clicking here: Exacttarget, Inc Form D SEC Filing.