Adobe has decided to buy Neolane – a privately-held French campaign management software company – for approximately $600 million in cash.

Neolane is one of the few fairly well-rounded marketing automation vendors left in the acquisition pool, after the biggies like Aprimo and Eloqua have been snatched up. (Marketo and Silverpop are a little out of the league here.) It took Adobe a long time to shape up such an acquisition to fill -- at least nominally -- the gaping void they have when it comes to marketing automation in their Adobe Marketing Cloud suite offering.

With this planned purchase, Adobe is aiming to take a more competitive stance with the likes of Oracle, Salesforce.com, and IBM; with their formerly known as Eloqua, ExactTarget, and Unica products respectively.

As we discuss in our detailed Digital Marketing research evaluation of Adobe, there are several product lines that form Adobe's "Marketing Cloud." Neolane will be the sixth, in addition to the Analytics, Target, Social, Experience Manager (former CQ5), and Media Optimizer offerings. Note that all of these six pillars came through a series of acquisitions that turned the Creative-Suite-empire into the modern Adobe: Omniture (2009), Day Software (2010), Demdex (2011), Auditude (2011), and Efficient Frontier (2012).

To round up its digital marketing portfolio, Adobe seems willing to pay a pretty penny: 10x Neolane’s 2012 revenues. Still this proposed transaction will cost less than Aprimo. And it is not the customer base that they’re after. The mere 400 worldwide Neolane customers (many of them already Adobe customers) are not likely to make a considerable financial difference in Adobe revenues, but the technology is what’s worthwhile in this transaction.

Cross-channel campaign management is Neolane’s forte. Other features like social marketing, mobile marketing, and possibly their recommendation engine could easily die off, since Adobe already has equivalent technologies already in place -- albeit not yet totally integrated with the rest of the suite -- via the Efficient Frontier and Auditude acquisitions.

In the meantime, customers should ready yourselves for more integration woes, cultural mishaps between the two companies, and (yet again) different branding and messaging – something we’ve seen over and over again with every Adobe acquisition. Seriously, I change my Facebook status less often than Adobe changes its digital marketing branding and messaging.

Of course, from a customer perspective, "branding" is overrated. The real challenges will come with integrating this potpourri of technologies and delivery models. RSG subscribers are welcome to schedule an advisory session with me for more details.