Greetings from beautiful Stone Mountain, GA, where I am currently prepping for my presentation tomorrow at Silverpop's Digital Marketer Customer Conference.  I'm looking forward to hearing more about the Silverpop/VTrenz deal tomorrow, but here are my thoughts so far:

Overall, I think this is a good move for Silverpop and an even better one for VTrenz.

VTrenz gets access to enterprise customers, and Silverpop's well-established resources: R&D, client base, professional services team.  And they break into the mainstream email marketing space.  A coup I think for a niche player from Fargo,ND which to date has been company to a solid, but very small collective of B2B electronic lead management tools.

And Silverpop enters a new market: B2B and now has a ready-made solution for marketers trying to use email to sell high-consideration products (think cars or health insurance rather than books or pet supplies).

But I also agree with Laura:  This acquisition doesn't rock the email marketing vendor landcape to its core.  I think that email delivery has grown so commoditized and there are so many vendors in the space, that it would be extremely hard for an acquisition in the space to be truly jarring any more.  But then, I'm not sure Silverpop meant for or needs this deal to "stand out."  It made a move to aggressively enter a growing market (B2B email).  And that, I think, is enough.