Who are the top 10 martech companies? It may surprise you

Let’s play a little game.

The chart above shows the top 10 marketing analytics and automation companies, ranked by their 2014 revenue in this category. Well, actually, the revenue numbers are there, but I have cleverly hidden the company names.

Can you guess who the companies are?

For bonus points, can you name them in order of their revenue from last year? (These revenue numbers include broader “marketing cloud” offerings, and services as well as applications directly offered by the companies in this category, but exclude revenue from CRM products.)

While you’re pondering that question — and to fill up some content above the fold, because I will reveal the answers below, so don’t go peeking — I’ll tell you where this data came from.

The research firm Outsell released their annual Media & Marketing: 2015 Market Size, Share, Forecast, and Trend Report last week. It includes financial estimates and strategic analysis of several segments in the industry, including marketing services (dominated by the large agency conglomerates), CRM, and this marketing analytics and automation category. They were kind enough to share a copy with me for this post.

Overall, the category grew 10.7% in 2014 worldwide to a combined revenue of $7.95 billion. Outsell predicts that growth will continue at 11% or so per year for the next four years, up to a total of $12.2 billion in revenue in 2018. They expect that the Asia Pacific and South America regions to grow the fastest in the years ahead.

Okay, enough stalling. Ready for the answers to our pop quiz?

Surprised?

I know I was. When I think about it, of course, all of these make sense — especially with the inclusion of marketing analytics and automation services, not just applications. They’re all major players in the space. But at least within the circles where I lurk in martech-related content marketing and social media, some of these have relatively little share-of-voice — especially compared to other brands who are far more vocal.

It’s entirely likely that’s my fault, and I should expand the range of sources I follow as input into my mental model of the martech industry. Or it could be that some of these companies could benefit from stronger thought leadership and evangelism in the space. Maybe both.

You may have questions or quibbles about exactly what the boundaries were for determing the set of companies included and calculating their applicable revenue. There, I must pass the buck defer to Outsell. But even if there is a healthy margin of error within this data, I suspect that the overall pattern would probably be similar.

I connected with Randy Giusto, VP and Practice Lead, Media, Advertising and Marketing at Outsell and the author of this report, over email and asked him what he though was the most surprising finding.

“Not many surprising findings from a market share/vendor perspective,” he replied. “I would have thought that investment would have dropped by now, but there seems to [be money] still flowing in, though probably not at the rate of 2014. I see the top 10 growing share over time as the market consolidates. The market can’t support the number of companies currently in the segment.”

In Outsell’s data, the Top 10 companies accounted for 32% of the revenue in 2014. I’ll be very curious to see how that changes over the next couple of years — partly because I wonder how much jockeying there will be by other martech companies scaling up.

I asked Randy if he thought further M&A-oriented consolidation among the market leaders would cause these “marketing clouds” to become more homogeneous or more differentiated from each other.

“I see them being a little more homogeneous as far as basic functionality,” he answered. “But they also each will come from a different perspective — Salesforce from its strong CRM connection, Adobe with a huge focus on creative and B2C, Teradata from its retail and B2C roots, Oracle thanks to Eloqua and the Oracle DB heritage. I think Marketo is interesting but it’s starting to feel like there are too many features, and I think they will find it difficult to compete upwards with the enterprise players. HubSpot, we’ll see.”

The “starting to feel like there are too many features” remark is interesting. I would expect that would be a challenge for all these vendors as they expand their footprint.

Marketing has become an astoundingly vast and technology-diverse industry. I still believe that the platform/third-party ecosystem model is the most rational solution to the paradox of simultaneous consolidation and diversifying innovation.

But looking at these Top 10 vendors from 2014, third-party ecosystems aren’t the strong suit of many of them. Is that a weakness in their strategy, or a weakness in my hypothesis?

As Randy says, “We’ll see…”

For other data and insights, check out Outsell’s report directly.

P.S. The headline for this post does sound a bit like a native ad targeted at marketing geeks, doesn’t it? Sorry about that.