Upland Embrace Email With Adestra Acquisition
The world’s largest cloud provider of Enterprise Work Management software – Upland – is buying the small British email marketing firm Adestra.
The Oxford-based Adestra, which helps organisations like Greggs, Evans Cycles, and the University of Birmingham to engage customers with enterprise grade email and marketing solutions, will now form another branch of Texas-based Upland’s Customer Experience Management (CXM) product suite.
With Adestra onboard, Upland‘s emerging CXM Solution Suite will now incorporate a host of features revolving around emails – including multi-channel messaging, automated mobile conversations via SMS, MMS, and RCS, mobile wallet functionality and marketing automation and personalisation solutions.
This comes at a cost of $56 million for Upland, and is just the latest in a string of acquisitions that has seen the company expand its European presence and build out its expertise in various complementary markets: In October 2018, Upland made its biggest acquisition yet with the purchase of customer engagement firm Rant &Rave, incorporating the company’s VoC and VoE solutions, and in March, Upland made another leap forward with the purchase of cloud-based faxing solution InterFax Communications.
The expertise garnered through these acquisitions will help Upland capitalise on what is a rapidly growing market. At $5.9 billion today, the CXM market is forecast to grow 23 percent each year to reach $16.9 billion by 2022.
Increasing numbers of email users mean that the global email marketing industry looks set to follow a similar trajectory, and Adestra is just one of a range of enterprise software solutions that have emerged to allow companies to effectively take advantage of this. With Adestra’s expertise, Upland is well-positioned to use email to capitalise on the growth of both of these markets, and is now expected to continue strengthening its offering with further acquisitions:
“Adestra broadens Upland’s product portfolio, strengthens our CXM solution suite, and builds our sales capacity and footprint. Moreover, the transaction is immediately and meaningfully accretive to Adjusted EBITDA per share and takes Upland to an approximate $190 million annualised revenue run rate. As this transaction demonstrates, our acquisition pipeline is robust, and we are actively pursuing additional opportunities.” said Upland CEO Jack McDonald.
