Adobe has just splashed out $600 million in cash to acquire the French marketing automation firm Neolane, best known for its “conversational marketing” technology. It’s products are pretty nifty, allowing marketers to integrate data from multiple online and offline channels, so they can send out customized, targeted messages, carrying out what it calls “lifetime dialogues” with customers.

According to Neoland, the idea is that marketers can keep on top of the increasing diversity and flood of digital interactions they need to manage, whilst delivering “timely, relevant and interactive” marketing messages at scale. The entire platform is said to be built on a single codebase, allowing for hassle-free integration and implementation. Marketers can use Neoland to execute campaigns across email, the web, social media channels, through call centers, direct mail and point of sale.

Neolane becomes the latest addition to Adobe’s Marketing Cloud, a software suite that aims to provide everything a marketer needs to locate, attract, understand, engage, communicate, monitor and track consumers. While there are many smaller startups that focus on the specific components of digital marketing, it looks as if Adobe, IBM, Oracle and Salesforce are drawing the battle lines as they fight to offer the most dominant, comprehensive ‘marketing cloud’ around.

This is apparent from the land grab that’s taking place right now. Just this month, Salesforce made the biggest acquisition in its history when it snapped up ExactTarget for $2.5 billion, while Oracle splurged $871 million on Eloqua about six months ago. Meanwhile, digital marketing automation giant Marketo is following a different path by going it alone, launching its IPO in April. There’s also a raft of startups emerging in this space, such as Discuzz, which aims to help salespeople perform better in their outreach.

For Adobe, the Neolane acquisition adds to its already formidable Marketing Cloud, which includes Omniture (acquired in 2009), Day Software (2010), Demdex and Auditude (2011) and Efficient Frontier (2012). neoland effectively becomes Adobe’s sixth digital marketing platform.

According to Gerry Brown, senior analyst at the industry analyst firm Ovum:

“An acquisition of this type has been a long time coming for Adobe – its lack of a campaign management platform has been a glaring hole in its digital marketing platform proposition.”

“Neolane has long been a thorn in IBM Unica’s side, winning deals off IBM with their lower cost ‘me-too’ proposition. 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 management market. The acquisition will also greatly improve Adobe’s position in France (Neolane’s home country) and in retail (Neolane’s strongest market).”

Brad Rencher, senior vice president and general manager of digital marketing for Adobe, underlined Neolane’s importance in the company’s strategy in a statement announcing the acquisition:

“This is a critical addition to our complete set of analytics, targeting, social, content management and media optimization solutions. Neolane will integrate with our solutions to empower cross-channel and highly personalized campaign management across the web, email, social, mobile, point of sale, direct mail, call center and other emerging channels.”

“The combination of Adobe and Neolane will give customers richer customer profiles, greater activation of social and mobile data, better definition of highly valuable customer segments, and more sophisticated automation and execution platforms. Many customers already rely on both Adobe and Neolane and will benefit from further integration between the Adobe Marketing Cloud and Neolane’s cross-channel capabilities.”