With only a small percentage of businesses yet using them, the growth potential does indeed look massive. “In Europe, we are encouraged to see more companies taking the first step by having discussions about marketing automation,” says Sylvia Jensen, Director of Marketing for EMEA, Eloqua. “Educating the EMEA market is crucial and we’re still very much in the education and awareness phase with some early adopters taking the lead.”
“In Europe, we are encouraged to see more companies taking the first step by having discussions about marketing automation.”
Sylvia Jensen, Director of Marketing for EMEA, Eloqua
Forrester estimates growth in campaign management at around 17%, firmly bucking the trend of the global economy. This makes intuitive sense. Some form of automation is now pretty much essential to manage the ever-proliferating number of channels to market and capitalise on
customer database investments, while tools that reduce costs while simultaneously driving up sales appeal to both finance and marketing top brass. “Marketing automation is more buoyant now than it has ever been,” says Andrew Hayward, Managing Director of m-hance. “With the financial climate likely to remain bleak in 2012, businesses are under pressure to achieve greater efficiency savings while delivering strategic marketing campaigns to gain competitive advantage.”
MARKET CONSOLIDATION To take three examples: Aprimo has had its best year ever, Eloqua is readying itself for an IPO, and Neolane increased its revenue in the first half of 2011 by 70% year-on-year as well as securing a new $27m round of VC financing. No wonder the big IT players are taking a predatory interest. Marketing automation has seen any number of acquisitions over the last decade or more with trailblazers like Prime Response, Xchange Applications, MarketFirst and Epiphany bought by Chordiant (now Pegasystems), Amdocs, Pivotal (CDC) and SSA/Infor respectively. Now we’re seeing a second period of consolidation. “There’s a natural cycle of mergers and acquisitions going on,” says Kevin O’Regan, VP of Sales and Alliances, EMEA at Aprimo. “The
market is still immature really and looks very different to how it did ten years ago.”
“Businesses are under pressure to achieve efficiency savings while delivering strategic marketing campaigns to gain advantage.” Andrew Hayward, Managing Director, m-hance
In 2011, IBM bought Unica and Coremetrics
with Teradata agreeing to acquire Aprimo. Oracle added Market2Lead to other recent purchases RightNow and ATG, while Emailvision bought Smartfocus earlier in the year. “There’s a lot of commoditisation in email delivery and Emailvision is trying to move further upmarket,” says O’Regan, whose own company acquired inbound specialist Helm Interaction Management just last year. “I expect to see even more consolidation in the market in the not too distant future.”
Emailvision didn’t wait long to make use of some of its new software: the version of Campaign Commander released last November
www.dmarket.co.uk
February 2012 33
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