Marketing Software

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 »

Every year, when the entries to the Stackie Awards flow in, I feel like the kid in A Christmas Story, excitedly opening up that present he’d be dreaming of. I am always delighted and inspired by the creative ways marketing teams visually represent their stacks — and so immensely grateful that they were willing to share them with our community. This year, we had 29 beautifully illustrated martech stacks sent in. They included several returning …

29 visually striking martech stack illustrations from the 2021 Stackie Awards Continue Reading »

Last week, Y Combinator held their Demo Day(s) for their Summer 2021 cohort. This was a massive graduating class: 377 startups from 47 countries. You can read a quick overview of all 377 (!) on TechCrunch, split across part one and part two. I read through all 377 and discovered 47 that I would put on the martech landscape. Here’s the list: Cococart — online store builder Writesonic — AI-powered copywriting tools AppX — app …

47 new martech companies from latest Y Combinator cohort — the counter-consolidation narrative lives on Continue Reading »

My friends over at MarTech just released their 2021 Martech Replacement Survey, revealing insights into what and why companies switch from one martech application to another. The top-line finding: there’s a ton of martech swapping happening! 67% of the 374 marketers they surveyed, from SMBs to large enterprises, reported replacing a marketing technology application in the past year. About half of them attributed the switch to their response to the pandemic. But for the other …

Aggregation and integration: why 67% of marketers replaced a martech tool in the past year Continue Reading »

Last week, Forbes published the 2021 edition of The Cloud 100 — their “definitive ranking of the best, brightest, most valuable private companies in the cloud.” The selection process involved an unpublished editorial formula that considered growth, sales, valuation, culture, and a “reputation score derived in consultation with 34 CEO judges and executives from their public-cloud-company peers.” Or, in other words, don’t read too closely into the exact ranking of any one company — there’s …

35 of the Forbes Cloud 100 companies are in martech Continue Reading »

There’s a scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where God appears in the clouds — in delightfully unsubtle Monty Python fashion — and commands Arthur and his knights to seek the Holy Grail. (Arthur: “Good idea, O Lord!” God: “‘Course it’s a good idea!”) I was reminded of that scene when reading the new Marketing Technology Overload? report released this week from the Tech Marketing Council. They asked senior marketing leaders — as …

The Quest for the Holy Grail: Martech Edition Continue Reading »