IDG News Service — Teradata is planning to buy integrated marketing software vendor Aprimo for US$525 million, the company announced Wednesday. The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of next year.

Aprimo sells a range of SaaS (software as a service) products that cater to both business-to-business and business-to-consumer marketing.

Teradata plans to combine Aprimo's technology with its own analytics and data warehousing products, enabling customers to run more marketing campaigns faster and more effectively over multiple channels, the company said.

The announcement follows IBM's acquisition of Aprimo competitor Unica earlier this year. Companies such as SAS Institute and Alterian also offer similar software.

Teradata plans to continue marketing Aprimo's software under that name. However, the companies will develop a joint product road map once the deal closes, said Darryl McDonald, executive vice president of business development and marketing at Teradata.

Teradata is already supporting marketing programs with its technologies, but the addition of Aprimo will allow it to provide a broader scope of capabilities, he said.

Aprimo's products will remain open to other database platforms besides Teradata, he added. "[Customers] can choose Teradata where it makes sense, or Microsoft (MSFT) or Oracle (ORCL) where it makes sense."

McDonald downplayed a suggestion the Aprimo deal could put a damper on certain partnerships, particularly its pact with SAS, which has optimized its marketing automation software for Teradata.

The companies' relationship won't change, McDonald insisted. "If anything, it's an opportunity for us to discuss [offering customers] a more complete set of software tools."

Overall, Teradata's move represents the latest effort by vendors to build out marketing platforms that can reach customers wherever they may be, while mining large volumes of data for insights.

Along with Unica (UNCA), IBM (IBM) also scooped up Web analytics vendor Coremetrics this year.

Adobe (ADBE) is in the game as well, furthering its "customer experience management" strategy with high-profile acquisitions like Omniture, another prominent web analytics company, and Day Software for Web content management.

The related trend of social media monitoring is set to heat up further in 2011, according to a new Forrester Research report.

Under the header of "listening platforms," the report identifies three product subgroups: social dashboards, multichannel analytics providers and listening service partners.

The listening platform market remains fragmented and could see a run of consolidation next year as CRM (customer relationship management) vendors as well as platform companies look to flesh out their social monitoring capabilities, Forrester analyst Zach Hofer-Shall wrote.

Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Chris's e-mail address is Chris_Kanaracus@idg.com