I’m pleased to announce that the 2022 Stackies: Martech Stack Awards are now open for entries for the next eight weeks — until midnight Pacific on Friday, April 29. There is no fee to enter. In fact, for each qualified entry, we — this year, the awards hosts are myself from chiefmartec.com and Frans Riemersma from MartechTribe — will donate $100 to a worthy cause. More on that in a bit. But first, what are The …

Share your martech stack illustration in the 2022 Martech Stackie Awards Continue Reading »

Okta, a leading identity platform that many companies use for single sign-on (SSO), has been aggregating the data of which apps their customers use for the past five years. Every year, they publish a report that shares a wealth of fascinating stats, such as the relative popularity of different apps. This is another example of ground-truth empirical data about tech stacks that I find highly credible. In the 2022 edition of Okta’s report, just released, …

Okta reveals 5-year trend of best-in-breed apps; also, a kind request I have of you Continue Reading »

Last year, I wrote about a pattern of aggregation platforms growing in martech stacks. The two key characteristics of an aggregation platform: It centralizes a cross-departmental capability (e.g., a cloud data warehouse). It grows in value as you connect more apps in your stack to it. That second point is important, and not only for the obvious network effects. To me, this triggered — or was triggered by — the recognition that tech stacks are …

Matrixed Tech Stacks with Both Horizontal and Vertical Aggregation Platforms Continue Reading »

Today, HubSpot announced a milestone of more than 1,000 integrated apps featured in the app marketplace for its CRM platform. The call to better integrate martech is being heard. As you may know, I joined HubSpot a little over four years ago to help grow its platform ecosystem. So I’m delighted to see this momentum build. And I feel like it’s still in the early stages of what it will become. A huge “thank you” …

The power of combinatorial innovation and 4 other lessons on the journey to 1,000 apps Continue Reading »

As an “armchair analyst” in martech, my favorite content comes from stack “aggregation” platform companies who publish the data of what their customers are actually doing. Unlike surveys that can be wildly biased and imprecise, aggregated usage data is empirical truth, straight up. Like the martech landscape, you can argue “why” and “where next,” but you can’t argue “what” the data is in the present. This week’s aggregated data gift is the 2022 SaaS Management …

SaaS stacks keep growing. Is there also a relationship between choice and utilization? Continue Reading »

Hello, 2022! Or document.write(“Hello, 2022!”) to those still in codeland. Following my wrap-up of martech from 2021 — tl;dr a year in digital marketing that was experienced like a Twitch stream at 1.5X speed — let’s jump in to the martech topics I expect will shape 2022. Now, it’s true, I’m generally quite skeptical of “predictions” and therefore reluctant to label this post as such. But since I spend my days deep in martech — long …

3 Big Martech Innovation Themes in 2022 Continue Reading »

Congratulations on making it to the end of 2021. It’s been a long year for everyone as we navigated the ongoing pandemic saga. From the perspective of advancing digital business, these past 21 months have seen leaps and bounds forward. But the circumstances that catalyzed this punctuated equilibrium of marketing’s evolution have been hard for so many in so many ways. I’m not going to subject you to the phrase “the new normal” again — …

2021: The Year Martech Shrank — Just Kidding (A Year in Review) Continue Reading »

There’s been some interesting debate lately about CDPs vs. CDWs — customer data platforms vs. cloud data warehouses. If CDWs such as Snowflake, Databricks, AWS Redshift, etc., are becoming a universal data layer in companies, is there still a role for domain-specific data platforms, such as marketing-controlled CDPs? The short answer, in my opinion, is “Yes, but it depends…” There is still a significant distinction between live business operations systems that run in real-time serving …

Data, Decisioning, Delivery & Design: A Framing for the CDP vs. CDW Debate Continue Reading »