05/16/2008

Alterian (LSE:ALN), the international integrated marketing platform provider, today announced its intention to acquire web content software company, Mediasurface (LSE : MSR). The addition of Mediasurface will expand the online execution capabilities of Alterian's integrated marketing platform to encompass websites, corporate intranets, extranets and social media channels all driven by Alterian’s market leading analytics capability.

ebizQ received the following:

"Online marketing is growing rapidly and has become core to the overall marketing activity of an organisation. Through the acquisition of Mediasurface, Alterian will create an integrated marketing platform that combines online and offline customer analytics with content and multi-channel execution to help marketers optimise customer experiences across the web in real-time," said Alterian CEO David Eldridge.

Eldridge continued, "This sets us apart from both the traditional marketing suites as well as emerging online players. We are already experiencing strong demand for our current products with revenue growth of circa 40% at constant currencies and profits doubling in the year ending 31st March 2008. We believe that Mediasurface products will provide even stronger growth opportunities for Alterian in the future both in new customer segments and new geographies. There is also a significant growth opportunity in North America – a market in which we have already proven our ability to execute with over half our revenues now coming from the US."

The combination of Alterian and Mediasurface will empower approximately 1,000 marketing departments and a network of 100 channel partners across 26 countries while more than doubling Alterian's number of employees to approximately 300 worldwide. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close late June 2008.

"Mediasurface is a growing company with great products and great customers," said Lawrence Flynn, CEO of Mediasurface. "We are very proud of the business we have built and appreciate that Alterian sees the value of what we are creating here. Alterian is an industry leader with a great vision and we are very excited to become part of their march to change the face of marketing."

Alterian's integrated marketing services platform has significantly evolved over the past 24 months through a mixture of organic development and acquisition. Having established itself as the database marketing software partner for industry giants such Accenture, Acxiom, Carlson Marketing, Experian, Epsilon, InfoUSA, Merkle, Ogilvy One and Euro RSCG Worldwide, Alterian built a powerful analytically led integrated marketing platform that delivers email, database, and operational marketing and reporting.

It is also the only company to be included in Forrester Research's The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Marketing Platform; Q1 2008, Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Marketing Management, 2Q07 and Jupiter Research's E-mail Marketing Buyers Guide, 2008. Most recently Alterian was included in Forrester Research’s The CRM 2.0 Imperative.

"All media are striving to become more personalised in the quest to improve customer experience and announcements made in the past two weeks by Google and MySpace reinforce this. This trend creates more complex content needs based on the individual consumer. As we have seen in other online channels such as email, it becomes critical for the content to become an integral part of the overall customer analytics and execution layer in order to meet these needs," said Jason McNamara, CMO, Alterian. "Analytics is the new measure of how well marketers understand their customers, but people react to content. And reaction and interaction with content creates new analytics. Unlike offline, these interactions are often inbound and real-time in nature, thus impossible to manage with manual processes. Web 2.0 and social media is consumer generated content that must be optimised in a platform."

"With the acquisition of Mediasurface, we believe Alterian is in the best position to help companies profit from how consumers interact and buy from organisations today. We look forward to working with customers and channel partners from both companies to deliver this exciting new capability," concluded Eldridge.