Marketing Software

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 »

For the past year I’ve been talking about a shift from Big Data to Big Ops. In short, today’s challenges with business technology are less about managing a huge volume of data — Big Data — most of which wound up in a basement-level data lake, outside the reach of everyday business users. Instead, we’re now wrangling a Cambrian explosion of digital processes across our organizations that actively engage that data as part of live …

Higher order effects of automation in Big Ops Continue Reading »

Traditional business thinking views change as risk, while composable thinking is the means to master the risk of accelerating change and to create new business value.” Monika Sinha, Research VP, Gartner That’s a quote from Monika Sinha, a research VP at Gartner, announcing the 2022 Gartner CIO and Technology Executive Agenda. The “composable enterprise” is term that Gartner uses for businesses that leverage technology and digital process automation as a modular set of Lego Blocks …

The Composable Enterprise brings us into The Great App Explosion & Big Ops Continue Reading »

First, welcome to the freshly updated chiefmartec.com site — or, if you’re reading in this in your inbox, our freshly updated email subscription service, a big step up from RSS-to-email through Google Feedburner. What’s that thing they say about the shoemaker’s children? Well, now we finally have some groovy new footwear. Metaphorically speaking. Anyway, on with the show… The effect the pandemic has had on all things digital has been enormous. For all the talk about …

Commerce is the latest (renewed) frontier in martech, putting the revenue in RevOps Continue Reading »

Productiv, a SaaS management platform (SMP), published a report on The State of SaaS Sprawl in 2021. Since Productiv’s software manages the tech stacks — or “app portfolios”, as they like to call them — of hundreds of organizations, the data in their report is based on objective facts of app adoption, instead of merely surveyed opinions. This kind of hard data is particularly helpful in scenarios where there tend to be wide gaps between …

Latest data on the size of tech stacks, er, app portfolios, and a philosophical question about shadow IT Continue Reading »