March 2021

I remember the mad rush to finish the 2016 marketing technology landscape five years ago, just in time to present it for my opening keynote at that spring’s MarTech conference in San Francisco. In the previous years — 2011, 2012, 2014, and 2015 — the landscape had grown exponentially, from 150 solutions to just under 2,000. Many pundits (*cough* here’s an old article with a few *cough*) thought that the field would consolidate dramatically. I …

There are as many European-based martech products today (3,647) as there were globally in 2016 Continue Reading »

I still remember fondly my young and innocent days a decade ago when I created the first marketing technology landscape. It categorized ~150 martech solutions — which at the time seemed epic in scale. “This must consolidate!” Ah, such innocence to the future of cloud dynamics. Last year, the martech landscape was up to 8,000 solutions. 5,233% growth within 10 years’ time. And martech is just a tiny slice of The Great App Explosion happening …

212 event-related martech companies. Make that 268. Wait, no, 316… Continue Reading »

Update: A new 2022 report from IDC has been published here. Our business model fundamentally is about creating more surplus outside us. We will only be long-term successful if people are making more money around us. That quote from Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, from a few years ago, resonates deeply with me. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Microsoft is now a $1.7 trillion platform company. People can argue a thousand different definitions …

A blossoming martech platform: IDC sizes the HubSpot ecosystem at $6.4 billion this year, $12.5 billion in 2024 Continue Reading »

On its surface, the martech landscape graphic I’ve produced for the past decade has limited insights to offer. If you observe that (a) “there are a @&#$% of martech solutions” and (b) “the overall martech field is growing, not shrinking” you’ve pretty much got the main takeaways. See platform dynamics driving martech app expansion and consolidation explained in one (relatively) simple model for my current best answer as to “why?!?” that is the case. But …

The Martech Show Episode #12: Martech Wars on the Web Continue Reading »