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When will the marketing automation industry consolidate?
In your opinion, when do you think the marketing automation industry will consolidate? Do you think it will be within the next few years, or do you think it will take longer than that?
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4 Answers
Shawn:
Consolidation has already begun with Oracle acquiring the assets of Market2Lead - http://www.oracle.com/market2lead/index.html and has now integrated it with their CRM platform - http://snurl.com/15xiiq as well as IBM's acquisition of Unica - http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/32309.wss
I do believe, as do many others, that this is the tipping point in the consolidation of the marketing automation industry. As adoption rates increase over the next few years we will see more of this but with the behemoths like Oracle and IBM getting into this space, I would contend this is just the beginning.
Carlos Hidalgo
The Annuitas Group
Yep, it has already started. Next 12-18 months will see a lot of change in my opinion. Still suprised that Oracle is the only CRM to jump in thus far.
Hi Shawn:
I think the current marketing automation vendors will simply become point solutions within larger, integrated suites that will provide tools for media buying (online and offline), search marketing, social media, email, Website personalization, nurture campaigns, and CRM, with supporting tools for budgeting and planning, content management, customer database and analytics. Ultimately anything that touches a customer or prospect should be coordinated through a unified system. We're seeing some of that already in systems for very small businesses, which have expanded scope beyond traditional marketing automation. See http://bit.ly/ddzF2f for a blog post on that topic.
Of course, a new category needs a new label -- Revenue Management? Demand Management? Customer Management? Audience Management? Hours of fun to debate.
I agree with Carlos. Everything Channel has began purchasing content syndication and email delivery tools to help tie their large database of IT professionals and end users together through automated marketing communications. IBM is really starting to ramp up with all their new networking tools, and Salesforce's platform has pretty much been there for the past 3-4 years.
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