With the market growing at 20% year-on year, those seeking to advise the world's biggest brands have been looking to own the digital transformation space through M&A.
There are a number of platforms that are trying to exert market leadership - whether it's Salesforce with its nine Salesforce towers around the globe looking to own CRM, Magento for ecommerce, Microsoft Azure for cloud computing, or Sitecore for CMS - for each one of the leaders there's a pack of chasing competitors that are very strong.
Those that can maximise the ecosystem are the most attractive. What comes from these platforms is a huge amount of data. Managing, understanding, analysing and then using this data to be able to provide return on investment for marketing solutions drives buyer appetite.
Platforms used to operate channel strategies in the past but these firms have now changed their strategy. Platform businesses are looking to consolidate, targeting fewer, deeper relationships. The impact of this is that M&A is becoming far more important as a growth strategy for platform players of all scales.
Watch the previous episodes in the series - Spotlight On Performance Marketing : exploring the impact of performance marketing on the agency and M&A landscapes and Spotlight On In-housing and its impact on mergers and acquisitions.