EBay today finalized the sale of its previously announced eBay Enterprise business. As part of this deal, Zeta Interactive, the big data-driven marketing firm co-founded by David Steinberg and former Apple and Pepsi-Cola CEO John Sculley, today announced that it has acquired the CRM division of eBay Enterprise.
Sources close to the two companies tell us Zeta Interactive paid about $80 million to $90 million in cash and stock for eBay’s customer relationship management (CRM) business.
In addition to its CRM division, eBay Enterprise has also sold a number of other business units, including the well-known Magento platform, to a consortium of private equity firms led by Sterling Partners and Permira. Those deals are all part of eBay’s previously announced $925 million sale of eBay Enterprise to the consortium. The Zeta Interactive deal was not previously announced.
Zeta Interactive helps brands track, manage and monetize their customer engagement by combining its existing data management platform and marketing cloud with CRM data from its clients. As Zeta Interactive CEO Steinberg told me, he believes that the acquisition of the eBay Enterprise CRM platform will allow his company to take its business “to a whole new level.”
While Zeta Interactive already offered a CRM solution, eBay’s service offers a lot more capacity for sending emails and notifications to users thanks to its powerful data warehousing, email and attribution platform.
The about 300 employees from eBay Enterprise’s CRM division will join Zeta Interactive. The combined company now has about 1,000 employees.
It’s no secret that eBay has started to divest itself of some of its non-core businesses (the prime example being the eBay/PayPal split). Steinberg argues that eBay never fully integrated its CRM business into its other tools (and eBay Enterprise itself is the result of eBay’s acquisition of GSI Commerce). The eBay Enterprise operations and enterprise technology services division is now owned by Sterling Partners. Permira itself acquired the Magento commerce technologies business and eBay Enterprise’s marketing solutions business.