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Posts Tagged ‘business analytics’

Polls and Surveys: Who’s Missing In Our 2013 #BigData landscape?

Published on April 25, 2013 by R "Ray" Wang

Big Data Vendors Seek To Move From Data To Decisions

The move from Data to Decisions examines the enablement of data-driven decisions across the entire organization. Holistic, data-informed decisions require a multi-diciplinary approach that incorporates performance monitoring with traditional business intelligence technologies. Gather key insights from your data, transform insights into actionable information, and then make the right decisions (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. The Shift From Data To Decisions

Source: Constellation Research, Inc. (right click to see the expanded image)

Four Sub Categories Emerge In The Big Data Landscape

Little shortage of solutions and vendors exists in the burgeoning big data market. At last count, Constellation found 200+ vendors claiming to provide solutions. As part of our research, we’re looking at big data in 4 sub categories (Figure 2):

Data sources. Information providers, structured data, content management, and unstructured data.
Information and orchestration. Acquisition tools, BI Appliances and VLDW, No SQL/New SQL, and governance.
Insight. Analytics and BI Visualization Tools.
Decisions and actions. Decision management, BPM, and CEP.

Figure 2. The Big Data Solutions Landscape

Source: Constellation Research, Inc. (right click to see the expanded image)

Your Help Requested

Between now and May 15th, we’re looking to complete this market overview and mapping. If we’ve missed a vendor or solution you are using, please let us know. In return for your time, we will add you to our Newsletter and include you in our Big Data Research panels (if you are a buyer). For vendors who think we’ve missed them, we’re more than happy to take a look and see what you have. Click here to mail feedback

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Disclosure

Although we work closely with many mega software vendors, we want you to trust us. For the full disclosure policy, stay tuned for the full client list on the Constellation Research website.

* Not responsible for any factual errors or omissions. However, happy to correct any errors upon email receipt.

Copyright © 2001 -2013 R Wang and Insider Associates, LLC All rights reserved.
Contact the Sales team to purchase this report on a a la carte basis or join the Constellation Customer Experience!

Event Report: Informatica Analyst Day Reveals A Growth Strategy

Published on March 18, 2013 by R "Ray" Wang

Informatica Sets The Stage For A New Chapter In Its History

Informatica held its annual industry analyst day February 26th to 27th, 2013 at the Rosewood Sandhill in Menlo Park. The event showcased Informatica’s go-forward strategy and road map for growth over the next three years. Key highlights include:

Capturing a $6.5B market opportunity in license and subscription revenues. Marge Breya, Informatica’s new CMO, set the stage with a vision of how Informatica is poised to capture a $6.5B addressable market. Key use cases include analytics, operational integration, cloud integration, master data management, and data governance. Achieving these results will require $3.6B in installed base plays, $1,9B in new logo plays, and $1B in geographic expansion. Key markets for geographic expansion include replacing hand coding in Brazil, China, Japan, Mexico, and Russia.

Point of View (POV): Constellation estimates a $300B enterprise software market for 2013 with $130B in applications and $170B in infrastructure software. Informatica intends to go after a $6.5B addressable market that includes analytics, cloud data integration, operational data integration, master data management, and messaging. Success will require an expansion in focus from the traditional IT leaders and developer buyers to the emerging needs of business leaders.

Supporting a world of Hybrid IT. Juan Carlos Soto, SVP & GM for Informatica Cloud, discussed how clients now see Hybrid IT as the new norm. In fact, cloud based adoption has shifted from line of business (LOB) owned to IT led adoption of cloud over the past three years. Soto sees three pillars of success that include delivery of a platform for hybrid IT, cloud services for all, and Informatica inside. Key features for 2013 include data masking, process automation, integration with Microsoft Dynamics AX, integration with NetSuite, integration with Workday, integration with Oracle CRM On Demand, integration with Amazon RedShift, and integration with Ultimate Software (which was announced March 13th).

(POV): In a world of Hybrid IT, Constellation expects integration to be a core requirement for success. Consumerization of IT has led to a proliferation of mobile and cloud endpoints that require sophisticated data integration capabilities among all possible connections, data flows, business processes, and access. Informatica’s success depends on its ability to attract the cloud integration decision makers and users for basic cloud integration for enterprise and those seeking more complicated enterprise cloud integration use cases. The platform for a Hybrid IT play via a Virtual Data Machine (VDM) has the most potential for success in creating new business models. Informatica Inside will succeed so long Informatica is seen as “the Switzerland” for integration in cloud stacks and solutions.

Providing the integration and quality requirements for a big data world. Ash Kulkarni, SVP & GM for Data Integration and Data Quality, addressed the analytical integration, operational integration, and data governance strategy. Informatica’s themes for next generation data integration include agility in development, flexibility for deployment, and confidence in management. New features in analytical data integration include built-in data virtualization, complex event processing, support for decision making, and big data integration for Hadoop customers. The data governance features include improved inference for data domain discovery, automated enterprise data discovery, business friendly glossaries with rich metadata lineage, streamlined workflow and task management, data masking, visual exception auditing, audit data retention policies for production and legacy apps archiving,
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Tuesday’s Tip: Focus On The Business Outcomes, Not Technology With Big Data

Published on February 26, 2013 by R "Ray" Wang

The Why Behind Big Data Starts By Asking What’s The Business Outcome

So organizations have lots of data. New techniques have emerged to correlate big data. Enamored by the potential of big data, leaders are now reinvesting in technologies to find hidden nuggets of insights with the business goals of:

Mitigating regulatory risks
Identifying operational efficiencies
Improving revenue growth
Creating market differentiation
Expanding the brand presence

These big data use cases often follow the business hierarchy of needs, which are based on concepts pioneered by Maslow (see Figure 1). More importantly, a key question in big data has been to ask the right question.

Figure 1. The Business Hierarchy of Needs Drives Many Big Data Use Cases

An Information Flow Approach Moves The Discussion From Data To Decisions

Unfortunately, the problem is most organizations start by talking about outcomes and then get mired in the technologies to achieve these outcomes. Big data technologies include advanced business analytics, application of existing technologies such as data warehousing and business intelligence. In many cases, application of decision automation, semantic technology and collaborative tools are also needed. Yet, from Data to Decisions requires the integration of quite a few disciplines.

Data to decisions is about taking data sources, transforming them into useful information, gathering key insights, and then making the right decisions (see Figure 2). Data sources, information, and orchestration belong in the realm of IT and hopefully will be delivered via the cloud. Insight, decisions, and actions are line of business driven areas which deliver the most value add:

Data sources. Expect a mix of structured, semi-structured, and lots of unstructured.
Information and orchestration. The mix of information types include physical, virtual, machine, and contextual.
Insight. Information translated to insight considers performance, deduction, inference, and prediction.
Decisions and actions. The outcomes are driven from next best action, prevention, suggestion, and even no action.

Figure 2. The Flow From Data To Decisions

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Event Report: #InforSummit Reveals More Than A Redesigned Infor

Published on February 17, 2013 by R "Ray" Wang

Changes at Infor More Than Cosmetic

Analysts and tech watchers gathered on Valentine’s Day, February 14th, 2013, for Infor Summit, a progress check on Infor, the third largest independent applications vendor in the market. While many customers may not have heard of Infor, most have heard of the brands it has acquired over the last 20 years. These venerable brands include Baan, BPCS, Epiphany, Hansen, Intentia, Lawson, MAPICS, NXTrend, SoftBrands, and Syteline. Since industry veteran Charles ‘Chuck’ Phillips took over Infor, the software vendor has grown revenue from $2.2B to $2.8B. More impressive, for the past 5 quarters, Infor demonstrated double digit license revenue growth. Infor is now the third largest private firm in Business Insider’s Digital List witha $16B valuation. The management team emphasized three key tenets of the Infor strategy:

Focus on microverticals. With over 2151 possible market micro verticals, Infor intends to go deeper than the 21 sectors often classified as verticals. For example, in the wholesale distribution sector, Infor supports micro verticals such as electrical, building materials (BMAT), industrial supply, heating ventilation air conditioning (HVAC), and auto. For the auto sector, micro verticals include interiors, fixing elements, and plastics and moldings.

Point of View (POV): Infor’s strategy to go deep on micro verticals comes at a time when SAP and Oracle are no longer substantially investing R&D in deep vertical functionality. By going deeper and more specialized in micro vertical industries, Infor can differentiate on features and functionality desired by customers. Infor’s hired over 800 developers since Charles Phillips joined. The delivery and support of micro verticals is accomplished as Infor’s support folks are co-located with the developers and many key folks are still in their original on-shore development centers. With 4000 developers just focused on apps, Infor has the economies of scale to focus on micro verticals.

Investment in internet architecture. Infor’s design principles begin with architecting software for the internet and embracing a world of heterogeneous apps. Support for the Open Applications Group Integration Specification (OAGIS) standards allows Infor to standardize on a canonical business language for information integration. Infor requires its legacy applications to communicate with each other via XML as the common alphabet for identifying business processes and for defining business messages. Infor has made significant technology investments including updates to the core technology framework Infor ION, the mobility framework Infor Motion, social software platform with Mingle, and analytics via Infor BI. Infor currently generates $100M in cloud revenues.

(POV): The overall support for OAGIS standards allows Infor’s legacy apps to communicate with newer applications and avoid duplicate creation of common components. This standardization marks the culmination of the original work initiated by Soma Somasundaram, EVP Global Product Development in 2010. With Infor ION in place, Infor now has an integrative fabric using loosely coupled architecture. Customers can run legacy apps and also take advantage of new products and solutions. Moreover, this enables Infor a platform for rapid integration of future acquisitions. Customers should pay close attention to see what acquired product families have been enabled to take advantage of Infor Ion and what upgrade paths should be made to take advantage of future innovation. Expect Infor to nudge customers to the cloud as the margins are higher and the pace of innovation is faster.

Creation of a consumer design experience. Infor took advantage of their New York City location to hire designers focused on user experience. As part of this transformation, they created their own internal agency called Hook & Loop. Marc Scibelli, VP of Hook & Loop is in charge of the 40 person team behind the design thinking transformation. From mobile apps to branding, Hook & Loop provides the creative services for Infor (see Figure 1).

Point of View (POV): Duncan Angove, President at Infor’s talk about Beauty as a Competence reflected the deep transformation throughout the organization. Infor’s new user experience was first revealed to customers at the 2012 Inforum customer conference. Users will notice a stark difference between the new apps and the old apps. When apps begin with user design instead of engineering, the end users benefit. Customers can expect to see the difference in the new apps but will have to wait for the old apps to catch up.

Figure 1. Flickr Feed Scenes From The Infor Summit

<iframe align=center src=http://www.flickr.com/slideShow/index.gne?user_id=35408001@N04&set_id=72157632767067526&detail=yes frameBorder=”0″ scrolling=no width=”600″ height=”500″></iframe>

Market Momentum Shows A Shift In Customer Preferences For Outcomes Not Technology

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News Analysis: SAP Business Suite on HANA

Published on January 11, 2013 by R "Ray" Wang

Next Stop On The Road To HANA: SAP Business Suite

In a global announcement in Palo Alto, New York and Frankfurt, SAP’s top executives Dr. Vishal Sikka, Rob Enselin, Jim Haggeman Snabe, and legendary founder and chairman Dr. Hasso Plattner announced availability of SAP’s Business Suite powered by SAP HANA. SAP has rewritten the Business Suite to work on SAP’s HANA platform and believes that customers will benefit for four reasons:

Smarter. The embedding of intelligence at the transactional level opens up new business models and process transformation. SAP’s customer Derek Dyer, Director of Global SAP Services for Deere and Company, emphasized that SAP ERP powered by SAP HANA has “revolutionized” how products and services are introduced to the market, especially in the MRP world. They see some transformational innovation as a result to faster MRP runs.

Point of View (POV): Embedded intelligence has been a key failure in today’s existing transactional applications. Customers have sought access to not only real time reporting, but also prediction. The goal is to get to smarter decisions at all levels of the organization. Customers will benefit from embedded intelligence. However, this will require people and technology training of the system to identify the patterns and algorithms required to serve up insight on demand. This will require intelligence at every vertical and micro vertical business process. Moreover, right-time requirements for in-context computing will turn out to be the surprise benefit as relevancy becomes more important through time, location, role, relationship, sentiment, and intent. Relevancy and context provide the smartness that is missing in today’s systems.

Faster. SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA addresses the need for speed. The in-memory columnar database reduces the input/output (I/O) time and allows for fast access to information. The result – faster processing and faster scenario evaluation. Fast transaction management times lead to faster decision making.

(POV): The analytics and crunching capabilities is what’s driving organizations to seek faster speed. Speed is the difference between a five day drug recall and a five minute drug recall. Speed is the difference between a 30 day supply chain plan versus the ability to reroute 2 iPhones to your store in 30 seconds. The impact is huge for customers if SAP does succeed. SAP’s not the first to do this as Workday has already done this for HR and Finance. However, for the entire SAP suite and given SAP’s market share, this is a big deal as this reduces the need for separate business intelligence systems. The performance difference will create a huge competitive advantage for those who adopt versus those who do not.

Simpler. SAP Business Suite on HANA delivers consumer grade user experiences. The goal is to embed live insight into business processes to drive immediate action. Today, people expect consumer-grade user experiences and the power to translate their live insight into immediate action. Enzo Bertolini, CIO, Ferrero Group expects to improve the trade promotions and supply chain planning process through both better simulation and mobile access.

(POV): SAP Business Suite on HANA provides SAP an opportunity to rethink how information is created, consumed, and shared. The push to a design thinking focus within SAP has led to significant improvement of the user experience throughout their portfolio of products. SAP Business Suite on HANA will be an opportunity to show case this new user experience.

Open. SAP plans to support database technology and vendor choice for its customers. Many database partners have committed to work with SAP support in-memory optimizations and provide the necessary support to ensure that customers will succeed. SAP is providing rapid deployment solutions, trained implementation consultants, and a comprehensive set of services to help clients make the migration to SAP HANA.

(POV): SAP has the opportunity to drive down database costs and improve performance. While the pricing model will be based on the percentage of application value, SAP must find a way to drive down overall costs if it is serious about improving adoption. This licensing requirement must be addressed as it will emerge as the most significant barrier to adoption.

SAP Faces A Challenge of Adoption Not Because of Technology, But Because of Customer Vision

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Monday’s Musings: Understand The Four Organizational Personas Of Disruptive Tech Adoption

Published on December 2, 2012 by R "Ray" Wang

Pace of Innovation Exceeds Ability To Consume

Rapid innovation, flexible deployment options, and easy consumption models create favorable conditions for the proliferation of disruptive technology. In fact, convergence in the five pillars of enterprise disruption (i.e. social, mobile, cloud, big data, and unified communications), has led to new innovations and opportunities to apply disruptive technologies to new business models. New business models abound at the intersection of cloud and big data, social and mobile, social and unified communications, and cloud and mobile.

Unfortunately, most organizations are awash with discovering, evaluating, and consuming disruptive technologies. Despite IT budgets going down from 3 to 5% year over year, technology spending is up 18 to 20%. Why? Amidst constrained budgets, resources, and time limits, executives are willing to invest in disruptive technology to improve business outcomes. Consequently, successful adoption is the key challenge in consuming this torrent of innovation. This rapid pace of change and inability to consume innovation detract organizations from the realization of business value.

Organizations Fall Into Four Personas Of Disruptive Technology Adoption

A common truism in the industry is “Culture trumps technology”. As organizations apply methodologies such as Constellation’s DEEPR Framework in improving adoption, leaders must first determine which of the four personas best fits their organization’s appetite for consuming and innovating with disruptive technologies.

The personas of disruptive technology adoption assess organizational culture in two key axes (see Figure 1). The first is how incremental or transformational an organization looks at applying disruptive technology to business models. The second assesses how proactive or reactive an organization is in carrying out new initiatives. Based on these dimensions, the four personas include:

Market leaders. Market leaders prefer to drive transformational innovation. They look at technologies as enablers in disrupting business models. They see competitive differentiation in delivering outcomes to customers. Market leaders accept failure as part of the innovation process. They fail fast and move on.
Fast followers. Fast followers prefer to react to the success of market leaders and their experiments. When they sense success, they tend to jump in. Fast followers do not like to fail and rapidly apply lessons learned from market leaders into their road maps. Fast followers tend to deliver scale in the markets as a counter balance to arriving later in the market.
Cautious adopters. Cautious adopters proactively deliver incremental innovation. They tend to take a more measured approach and spend more time studying how they can improve an existing success than creating a transformational change. Cautious adopters often come from regulated industries where security and safety are paramount objectives.
Laggards. Laggards tend to procrastinate on applying innovations to their business models. They prefer not be bothered by trends and will only react when the trends have moved beyond mainstream. They see value in waiting as prices will drop over time as success rates increase over time. Laggards enjoy waiting.

During the interviews and discussions with the 2012 Constellation SuperNova award participants, key questions emerged in the decision process on whether to adopt or pass on a disruptive technologies. These questions aligned well with the four personas of disruptive technology adoption.

Figure 1. Organizations Should Understand Which Persona Of Disruptive Tech Adoption Describes Them Best

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Market Maker 1:1: Beyond #BigData, The Shift To Decision Management w/ James Taylor (@jamet123)

Published on September 13, 2012 by R "Ray" Wang

From Data to Decisions – The Shift To Decision Management

Organizations have faced a constant technology arms race to achieve basic levels of decision management. From data warehousing, to data marts, to reporting tools to BI, and now Big Data, organizations and leaders have been inundated with technology fads. While the the latest buzz in technology may come and go, Constellation Research believes organizations seek a path from data to information to insight to action. This path from Data to Decisions drives the science and discipline behind decision management.

Consequently, decision management in the data to decisions world examines the necessary tools, steps and methods for deriving insight from data and acting on it. These tools are useful creating informed people and processes, but the continuation and follow-through to decisions and actions demands a robust set of performance monitoring and management practices. Those are the table stakes. In many cases, application of decision automation, semantic technology and collaborative tools are also needed. Data 2 decisions is about moving from insight to action and moving to fact based decisions making at all levels of the organization.

I sat down with James Taylor, a thought leader in this space to hear his insights on the latest trends.

The Inside View With James Taylor – One of The Leaders In Decision Management Systems

R “Ray” Wang (RW): James is the CEO and a Principal Consultant of Decision Management Solutions. He is the leading expert in how to use business rules and analytic technology to build Decision Management Systems. James is passionate about using Decision Management Systems to help companies improve decision making and develop an agile, analytic and adaptive business. He provides strategic consulting to companies of all sizes, working with clients in all sectors to adopt decision making technology. James has spent the last 20 years developing approaches, tools, and platforms that others can use to build more effective information systems. He has led Decision Management efforts for leading companies in insurance, banking, health management and telecommunications.

James is the author of “Decision Management Systems: A practical guide to using business rules and predictive analytics” (IBM Press, 2011). He previously wrote Smart (Enough) Systems: How to Deliver Competitive Advantage by Automating Hidden Decisions (Prentice Hall) with Neil Raden, and has contributed chapters on Decision Management to multiple books including “Applying Real-World BPM in an SAP Environment”, “The Decision Model”, “The Business Rules Revolution: Doing Business The Right Way” and “Business Intelligence Implementation: Issues and Perspectives” as well as many articles to magazines.

In addition to strategy and implementation consulting, James delivers webinars, workshops and training. He is a regular keynote speaker at conferences around the world such as the Decision Management Summit, Business Rules Forum, Predictive Analytics World and IBM’s Business Analytics Forum.

James was previously a Vice President at Fair Isaac Corporation where he developed and refined the concept of decision management. The best known proponent of the approach, James helped create the emerging Decision Management market and is a passionate advocate of decision management. He understands how companies buy and use these technologies and he has helped companies successfully adopt these technologies and apply them in the context of Business Process Management and Business Intelligence initiatives.

1. I noticed that you are tying Decision Management to the Customer Relationships? What are some basic principles that someone knew to this space should know about?

James Taylor (JT): Historically Decision Management got applied primarily in risk and fraud but the energy recently has shifted to customer decisions. Decision Management works best on high volume, repeatable decisions. For most organizations, decisions about customers are the ones they take most often. Focusing on how to manage these decisions offers companies tremendous value in becoming more customer-centric and improving their customer engagement and relationships. At the end of the day your customer relationships are driven by their reaction to the decisions you make about them. Developing systems to manage these decisions that are agile enough to change when that is necessary, that embed analytics to improve these decisions, and that are adaptive so they can improve over time is a critical need for better customer relationships. Managing customer decisions is not the only thing you can do with Decision Management, just a great place to start to unlock customer value and drive the customer journey.

2. What’s been the big shift in the journey from Data to Decisions?

(JT): I think there have been three big shifts. The first is an increase in the use of more advanced analytics. Where reporting and perhaps dashboards used to be the primary way to use data, now more organizations are using data mining, predictive analytics and advanced visualization techniques. We see a tremendous growth in these more advanced analytics. Second we also see a focus on operations and operational decisions, with more organizations trying to improve decision-making at the front-line of their organization – where they interact with customers and their supply chain – not just in their back office. Finally we are beginning to see organizations becoming explicit about the decisions involved. Instead of just putting data out there, summarizing it and perhaps visualizing it and hoping that someone will be able to make better decisions, organizations are explicitly identifying the decisions that they need to improve. Then they are building the right kind of decision support or decision management system to ensure that decision gets done right. This last topic is a personal interest and one of the most exciting sessions for me is the hands-on session where folks will actually get to do some decision modeling.

3. Where are we with this fad and hype around #bigdata? Is this just the beginning or will we morph?

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Monday’s Musings: The New Engagement Platform Drives The Shift From Transactions

Published on August 27, 2012 by R "Ray" Wang

Convergence In The Five Forces Of Consumerization Of Technology Drives The Next Big Thing

Social has given us the tools to connect. Mobile has given us the ability to interact any time and anywhere. Cloud delivers access points to us with a rich array of content and information. Big data provides us with the context and information to make decisions. Unified communications and video transform how we share ideas. This convergence of the five forces of consumerization drives the next shifts in technology. The move from transaction to engagement and from engagement to experience is happening now. The era of transactional apps rapidly makes way for the era of engagement.

If Business Value And Outcomes Are The Goal, Then We Need An Engagement Platform For The Enterprise

The arrival of engagement platforms does not signify time to throw out the transactional systems. In fact, those systems provide the foundation required for engagement. The engagement layer exposes transactions and allow for deeper interaction and richer sources of information. However, the transactional systems lack the ability to support engagement.

In fact, organizations around the world struggle with building the right engagement strategy for their customers and employees. While crafting the right strategy should be designed prior to any technology selection, once completed, the technology to support the strategy does not exist out of the box from ANY solution provider. Unfortunately, the technologies to achieve engagement remain disparate and hodge podge. Many solution providers seek to achieve the engagement layer from different heritages:

Figure 1. Technologies Will Evolve From Transactions to P2P

The Engagement Platform Requires Nine Main Technology Components

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Event Report: CRM Evolution 2012 #CRME12

Published on August 14, 2012 by R "Ray" Wang

CRM Continues To Evolve In A World Of Engagement

The CRM industry’s major non-vendor customer focused event kicked off at the Marriott Marquis in New York from August 13th to 15th. Conversations with prospects and practitioners at the event highlighted a few emerging trends:

Shift from transaction to engagement. CRM traditionally focused mostly on the management, a bit on the customer, and very little on the relationship. Major shifts in engagement strategy reflect a move towards two way conversations, unstructured information, and influence models.
B2B and B2C are dead. The notion of forced fit silos to represent a customer no longer applies. The world is rapidly move to people to people models and new systems must reflect this.
The rise of customer experiences. Prior to the coining of the CRM term, front office was the term which defined marketing, service, eCommerce, and sales force automation. The move back to integrated customer experiences reflects a renewed interest in all the front office touch points and all the support in the back office required to support the customer experience.
SaaS/Cloud Best of Breed hell is a real issue. Rapid and random deployment of best of breed solutions versus mature suites results in some basic architectural deficiencies. These deficiencies result in inefficiencies that impact the delivery of customer experience as process, data, and meta data integration increase in complexity and cost.

The Bottom Line: Customers must focus on delivering a single source of truth in the fundamentals

Customers making the shift to next generation customer experiences realize that the basic laws of physics must not be violated. Regardless of where key components reside, a single source of truth must be delivered to support next generation customer experiences. This requires a strong blue print and engagement platform that delivers:

Listening and intent
Interaction history
Master data management (customer master)
Business process management
Complex event processing
Security and identity management
Integration

Your POV.

Are you ready for the new shift to front office? What are you doing to deliver an integrated customer experience? Add your comments to the blog or send us a comment at R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) org or R (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com

Please let us know if you need help with your business strategy efforts. Here’s how we can assist:

Assessing social business/digital marketing readiness
Developing your social business/digital marketing strategy
Designing a data to decisions strategy
Create a new vision of the future of work
Deliver a new customer experience and engagement strategy
Crafting a new matrix commerce strategy

Related Research:

Reprints

Reprints can be purchased through Constellation Research, Inc. To request official reprints in PDF format, please contact Sales .

Disclosure

Although we work closely with many mega software vendors, we want you to trust us. For the full disclosure policy, stay tuned for the full client list on the Constellation Research website.

* Not responsible for any factual errors or omissions. However, happy to correct any errors upon email receipt.

Trends: The Battle For CMO Mind Share

Published on August 2, 2012 by R "Ray" Wang

Marketing and Advertising Budgets Are The New Land Grab

Constellation Research, Inc. predicts that the global advertising market (paid search, display, and classified) will hit $125B by 2015. While IT budgets continue to stay flat, marketing budgets are up. Warc’s recent Global Marketing Index (GMI) entered positive territory in March 2012. Consequently, the heat up in marketing and advertising market attracts not only start-ups, but also tech vendors looking to enter this lucrative market.

Solution Providers Rediscover The CMO Budget

In just less than 28 months, enterprise software vendors have bolstered their presence with Chief Marketing Officers mostly through acquisitions and partnerships. The goal – capture budgets allocated for digital creation, marketing automation and revenue optimization, advertising, CRM and customer experience, analytics, and information brokering (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. The Battle For The CMO Budget Comes From Six Fronts

Why the change? Marketing sits at the cross roads between the old analog world and the new shift to digital transformation. With each big shift, organizations will change what technologies they invest in, who they decide to partner with, and how quickly they will make the shift. This new battle for CMO mind share started when IBM purchased Unica for $480M in August 13, 2010 (Figure 2). The frenzied activity by Adobe, Dell, Eloqua, Google, Hubspot, Kana, Marketo, Oracle, Salesforce.com, and SAS Institute reflect the desire to be top of mind among CMO budgets.

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