Microsoft buys marketing-automation firm MarketingPilot

Just ahead of its Q2 FY2013 earnings announcement, Microsoft is announcing some acquisitions.

On October 16, it was Microsoft announcing its intentions to buy cloud-storage vendor StorSimple. And today, October 17, Microsoft announced it has closed on acquiring a marketing-automation firm MarketingPilot for an undisclosed amount.

Microsoft is set to announce its second quarter earnings on October 18.

The MarketingPilot acquisition is interesting as today is the first most of us have heard about it. I asked Microsoft when it made the bid to acquire MarketingPilot and was told by a spokesperson this happened a day or so ago.

Microsoft announced the closing of its bid for MarketingPilot via a blog post on its Dynamics CRM community site. From that post:

"MarketingPilot provides Integrated Marketing Management solutions to better understand their customers, manage and streamline marketing operations and create automated and measurable multi-channel marketing campaigns. This acquisition is a very exciting step forward for us, and will accelerate our ability to better meet the needs of CMO's (chief marketing officers) through rich business intelligence, and better enable marketers to successfully plan, execute, monitor, and optimize customer interactions across digital, social and traditional channels, and measure ROI."

Microsoft is promising to share more at its Convergence conference in March 2013 to detail its plans around MarketingPilot.

Among MarketingPilot's current products, which are laregely targeted at marketing and advertising agencies, are an integrated marketing-management system; lead management; ad-buying management; and its own CRM system.