On Thursday ( 27.6.13 ) Adobe Systems bought French firm Neolane for $600m which brings cross-channel campaign management capabilities to the Adobe Marketing Cloud and adds to the existing analytic, target, social experience manager and media optimiser offerings.

Commenting on the deal yesterday, Adobe senior vice-president and general manager of digital marketing business Brad Rencher (pictured) said: “From campaign creation through panning, exaction and optimization, Adobe technology is driving the entire marketing process.”

However, with the purchase of Neolane, which has over 400 customers worldwide, analysts warned that this could see the start of a vendor war.

Ovum senior analyst Gerry Brown said Neolane had long been a thorn in IBM Unica’s side winning deals off IBM with its lower cost ‘me-too’ offering,

He added: “The acquisition will enable Adobe to compete with IBM and their genre, SAS and Teradata, in particular for large deals (+$250,000 ) in the enterprise campaign market.”

Principal analyst for customer intelligence professionals at Forrester Research Rob Brosnan agreed and added that Adobe’s move would reshape the industry “more than any other acquisition in recent memory”.

Writing on his company blog, Brosnan added that the deal offered Adobe the chance to be a disruptor: “Because it now monetises data and orchestration, it could afford to shift the marketing value chain in messaging away from the existing incumbents.”