Download In the battle for industry dominance, five marketing cloud platform

THE
MARKETING
CLOUD WARS
2016
In the battle for industry dominance, five marketing
cloud platform behemoths lead the field. By Jason Compton
Intro
In March, 2014, The Hub’s first editor, Omar Akhtar,
took an in-depth look at the race between five legacy tech giants to develop the first truly integrated,
cloud-based marketing suite. Akhtar caught lightning
in a bottle. Widespread interest in the topic, and his
unique perspective, made his piece the most widely
read and shared feature The Hub had yet published.
What’s more, although Akhtar didn’t officially anoint
a winner in the race, his comments on the strengths
of Adobe’s offering pre-empted Forrester’s designation of Adobe as leader of the marketing-cloud pack
some months later.
Times change, of course, and most of the marketing cloud offerings discussed by Akhtar have been in
a constant state of evolution, in fact. The overall dominance of four out of five vendors, at least, persists,
but is increasingly under challenge, from competitors
like SAP, Experian, Sitecore, and Hubspot; by startups
launching much more limited but also more affordable
products aimed at the midmarket; and — very significantly — by a groundswell of support for open marketing stacks, custom built from individual point solutions.
But we’re dealing with the big vendors, and they
haven’t been idle. Whether through in-house development or acquisition, they’ve sought to improve
the proffers outlined by Akhtar, and address many of
the weaknesses he identified. We asked contributing writer Jason Compton to take a fresh look at the
marketing cloud landscape, and the results are here.
You can be sure of one thing: A few months from
now, the terrain will have changed again.
— Kim Davis, editor-in-chief, The Hub
M
arketers have put the pressure on marketing cloud vendors. They’re demanding centralization, simplification, and
access to powerful data and campaign
execution solutions — all without significant involvement from corporate IT. The result? Marketing cloud vendors are enhancing the size, scale, and
shape of their platforms.
The bigger cloud vendors are also responding to
market pressure of a very different kind: demands
from early stage investors who want to cash in and
move on from the countless recent experiments
in social marketing, programmatic campaigns, and
mobile outreach in recent years.
“The market of hundreds of point solutions is dividing into the winners, who get acquired at a reasonable price, and the ones that aren’t able to scale
their offerings,” says Andrew C. Frank, VP, distinguished analyst at Gartner.
As the number of addressable devices explodes,
and customer data sources become ever-richer,
marketing clouds will offer the ideal mission control for
a host of marketing campaigns and customer interaction strategies that can barely be imagined today.
“It’s not just marketing automation anymore.
Marketers want solutions that are more integrated,
that leverage both external and internal data with
sophisticated tools and data science,” says Rebecca Wettemann, VP, research at Nucleus Research.
“And the big vendors realize there’s money to be
made there.”
Last year The Hub examined the fates, fortunes,
and growing pains of five major marketing cloud
solutions. This year we return to the big five and
see what has changed. Adobe finished 2014 in pole
position, but the other four — IBM, HP, Oracle, and
Salesforce — have all devoted tremendous amounts
of money and time to finding a way to catch up and
stay caught up.
In 2014, we said there were at least four
components that every digital marketing cloud
should offer:
1) Multichannel marketing automation for publishing and promoting content that helps marketers
engage customers across several different channels, particularly mobile and social. It also needs
automation for the intelligent algorithms that sequence how that engagement happens.
2) Content management tools to create and
manage the content and engagement tools that
can be deployed across different channels.
3) Social media tools for listening to and engaging with social media networks, tapping into consumer conversations, and responding with custom
content or social media advertising.
4) Analytics to create profiles of consumers
based on their online behavior, and evaluate which
marketing campaigns are working and which aren’t.
Each of the five major vendors now offers all the
above tools, well-tested and integrated, and they’re
each seeking to build out more ambitious capabilities — notably predictive analytics and sophisticated customer journey mapping. See how they fared
this year.
Adobe
A
dobe established a first-mover advantage
with its 2009 purchase of the marketing
and Web analytics platform Omniture,
shortly thereafter introducing the world to
the concept of an integrated marketing cloud. This
put the company once known mostly for creative
tools at the forefront of end-to-end, cutting-edge
customer outreach. Today, Adobe Marketing Cloud
comprises the following solutions:
Analytics: Based on the former Omniture solution,
now Adobe’s big data analysis and segmentation tool.
Social: Adobe’s social media tool, built on the back
of its acquisition of context optional/efficient frontier in 2012. Social allows for listening across networks — including Facebook, Google+, Twitter,
Pinterest, and blogs — creating targeted ads, identifying influencers, and moderating discussions from
a single hub.
by Adobe’s 2015 acquisition of Tumri (also known
as Ensemble) programmatic technology from Collective, helping marketers reach audiences with a
wide range of creative content at scale.
Campaign: For planning and executing campaigns
across all channels, as well as automating targeted
promotions and offers to specific customer groups.
It is Adobe’s multichannel marketing automation
program, built on its acquisition of Neolane, the
cross-channel marketing automation software and
services platform.
Target: For testing and targeting content and experiences for specific groups.
Experience Manager: For creating owned properties
such as websites, forums, and other digital assets.
Audience Manager: Added to the Adobe Marketing
Cloud in 2015, Audience Manager makes it easier to
develop consistent, unified customer identification
across multiple touchpoints and experiences. This
in turn allows companies to build deeper customer
profiles, and reach lookalike audiences through social platforms and ad networks.
Media Optimizer: For creating and optimizing advertising across different channels; strengthened
Primetime: Another newcomer to the full Adobe Marketing Cloud suite, Primetime delivers
customer-relevant television experiences to any
screen. Now that it’s part of the full Adobe Marketing Cloud, expect an ever-growing range of options
to bring customers and prospects into custom video experiences.
Adobe continues to earn analyst ratings at or
near the top of the heap, including Gartner’s highest
marks for both completeness of vision and ability to
execute in its December 2014 “Magic Quadrant for
Digital Marketing Hubs.” The challenge of operating
from a position of strength, as Adobe does, is that it
must be defended.
To that end, Adobe has stayed very active in the
acquisition game, buying comScore’s Digital Analytix technology in late 2015. This gives Adobe a
growing range of deep-dive, big data manipulation
and insight tools to offer customers, and a new way
to get ahead of large marketing cloud competitors
by acquiring a smaller competitor.
“They’re still in the acquisitions game and not
ceding anything,” Gartner’s Frank says. “You’re going to continue to see them compete aggressively,
make acquisitions, and deliver innovation well into
2016 and beyond.”
Enhancements to Adobe Experience Manager
include a customer journey designer and tracker,
and enhanced asset management. Adobe is making
it easier than ever to design and deploy customized
landing pages and campaign elements with a wider
range of media — including interactive video. Adobe
has also set its sights on the Internet of Things, or
as it terms it, the “Internet of Experience,” with the
goal of helping marketers better personalize experiences across wearable devices, as well as smart
screens found in public IoT devices like elevators
and gas pumps.
STRENGTHS
Adobe’s early gains in the marketing cloud space
were based on the twin pillars of rich data insights
and rich content design capabilities. The fact that
so many creative shops already run Adobe makes
the content ecosystem particularly compelling to
anyone responsible for campaign execution. Adobe
has maintained a consistent emphasis on integration between components of the marketing cloud,
with analytics as the core. This makes it easier for
marketing organizations to act in concert and work
from a single version of the truth. With each year,
the links between components grow stronger.
Adobe has also been aggressive about addressing problems and increased complexity as its marketing cloud adds new features and components.
The recent acquisition of Digital Analytix, as well as
internal development work on identity management, are designed to avoid the confusion and lack
of actionable insights when multiple marketing systems track the same customer with different, disconnected visitor IDs across multiple touchpoints
and technologies.
Workflow and audience profiling remain the strong
suits of the Adobe Marketing Cloud experience, and
the solution remains firmly focused on the needs
and concerns of marketing professionals.
WEAKNESSES
As rich and deep as Adobe’s marketing and creative
capabilities have been, sales and service capabilities
have lagged. Until recently, Adobe Marketing Cloud
lacked a significant CRM connector or partnership.
The tide started to shift with a recent Microsoft strategic partnership, which includes Dynamics CRM and
Office 365, but isn’t a game-changer for most customers or prospects. Nucleus Research’s Wettemann
was a critic of Adobe’s limited CRM capabilities in 2014
and the partnership hasn’t quieted her concerns.
“It’s more about exposing Microsoft’s customers to the Adobe cloud,” she says. “It gives Microsoft better ability to compete against Salesforce. It
doesn’t do as much to put Adobe ahead.”
It is also a premium solution at a premium price.
“Adobe remains a fit for companies with sophisticated marketing needs that require best-ofbreed solutions — and with the budget to support
them,” notes “The Forrester Wave: Digital Experience Platforms, Q4 2015.”
Salesforce
T
he company that defined the sales cloud
has been laboring to do the same for the
marketing cloud since making a series of
splashy acquisitions, beginning with ExactTarget in 2013. In addition to internal development, Salesforce Marketing Cloud was built on
these key purchases:
• Radian6: Social media listening and monitoring,
acquired for $326 million in 2011.
• Buddy Media: Social media content publishing and
management, acquired for $745 million in 2012.
• Social.com: Social media advertising, formerly
Brighter Option, acquired by Buddy Media earlier
in 2012.
• ExactTarget: Marketing automation platform,
acquired in 2013 for $2.5 billion, a deal which
included Pardot, the marketing automation
platform previously acquired by ExactTarget.
Salesforce’s early strategy was to build out the best
available cloud marketing capabilities and pair them
with cutting-edge social listening and outreach solutions. More recent developments include the rollout
of Salesforce Engage, which seeks to make it easier
for sales and marketing to collaborate over content.
“It has nothing to do with ‘engagement,’ it has
everything to do with aligning sales and marketing,” says Paul Greenberg, owner and managing
principal at The 56 Group.
Crucially, Salesforce says it has now fully integrated the capabilities of Radian6, Buddy Media, and ExactTarget into the Salesforce Marketing
Cloud. The next stages will focus on enhanced execution, not least a new user interface, Lightning Experience, which includes a visual app builder with
drag-and-drop capabilities. The goal is to put powerful predictive analytics into campaigns that can
be designed with a swipe or mouse click.
“We want marketers to take browsing behavior, affinities, and past purchase behavior, marry
that with predictive intelligence, and drag that content block into an email,” says Gordon Evans, VP of
product marketing at Salesforce.
Other new developments include Predictive Decisions, an advanced intelligence tool, and
Journey Builder, which seeks to tell a unified sto-
ry about a customer’s path through sales, marketing, and service channels. Active Audiences,
Salesforce’s new partner-driven programmatic
play, aims to increase the accuracy and efficiency
of advertising across over 100 digital ad networks
and platforms. Salesforce has announced marketing development partner status with the major social networks, including Facebook, Pinterest,
and Instagram, giving the platform deep hooks
into emerging placement strategies.
STRENGTHS
Salesforce took an early leadership position in social and is working to protect that lead by innovating around IoT-generated customer data and
other emerging data feeds by acquiring RelateIQ
(now SalesforceIQ). The company’s strong roots in
lead generation show in partnerships like a recent
Facebook integration enabling visitors to pre-fill
forms when clicking through social posts, making
it effortless for visitors to qualify themselves with
Facebook-validated personal information.
The Salesforce Marketing Cloud continues to earn
strong endorsements from analysts for breadth of
functionality and the health of its partner ecosystem.
“We view Salesforce’s vision as one of the most
likely to provide large organizations with the tools
to realize digital transformational goals,” is the view
from “The Forrester Wave: Digital Experience Platforms, Q4 2015.”
WEAKNESSES
Salesforce has closed gaps in programmatic and
customer service, but there are still visible seams
between its various cloud solutions.
“While Salesforce remains a powerhouse on sales
and service, and the marketing cloud has many loyal
customers, the integration between these clouds and
marketing is not fully executed — lacking common
tooling, architecture, or code base,” notes “The Forrester Wave: Digital Experience Platforms, Q4 2015.”
Salesforce’s heavy reliance on vendor and developer partnerships has been a strength, but as
the market continues to consolidate, that advantage may shift to a liability.
“Salesforce’s success comes from the idea that
we’ve been looking at a very cooperative marketplace.
I predict that as this market matures, it’s going to be
harder for companies to partner with those they’re
also competing with,” Gartner’s Frank says. “Companies are going to start becoming clearer about the
boundaries where they compete with each other.”
Oracle
O
racle’s path to a Marketing Cloud was vintage Oracle. The tech giant lurked in the
shadows while upstarts battled to define
the market and establish a foothold, then
it swooped in late — but not too late — with huge acquisitions that made Oracle a force to be reckoned
with. After snapping up B2B marketing automation giant Eloqua and B2C marketing automation
stalwart Responsys, along with analytics provider
BlueKai and insight shop Datalogix, Oracle spent
much of 2015 digesting its haul.
“They’ve bought some very strong products, and
this year was spent integrating those products,” Wettemann says.
Notably, Oracle is doing more than just enjoying
the revenue streams of its kills. The Oracle Marketing
Cloud is a thriving entity. In addition to the core capabilities of Eloqua and Responsys, Oracle Marketing
Cloud offers Compendium, a content creation platform, and a suite of social relationship management
tools with open API connectors to several ad platforms. A recent partnership with MediaMath helps
address Oracle’s data integration shortcomings.
“Oracle’s acquisition strategy has a history of
underinvesting in the acquired product; but in this
evaluation we’re starting to see glimpses of the
turnaround strategy,” states “The Forrester Wave:
Digital Experience Platforms, Q4 2015.”
Oracle has prioritized bringing its marketing cloud
to wherever users need it most, and that means more
content- and campaign-building capabilities for mobile users. A new mobile interface packs an impressive amount of functionality into a handheld package.
“They’ve done a brilliant job integrating sales,
ERP, and marketing capabilities on a mobile device,”
The 56 Group’s Greenberg says.
When Oracle moves, the market takes notice, and
the distinction it’s now drawing between marketing and
data capabilities could ripple throughout the space.
“The acquisition of BlueKai was used to divide their
offerings into the marketing cloud and the data cloud,
which is an interesting, unique way of thinking about
the market and their offerings,” Frank says. “It will be
interesting to see if other companies follow their lead.”
STRENGTHS
Oracle paid for the best available solutions in Responsys and Eloqua, and has made crafty additions ever
since. The company’s incredibly deep roots in data storage and analysis can only be an asset, and even in niche
capabilities such as sentiment analysis, Oracle is getting
high marks for natural language processing in over two
dozen languages. Despite initial skepticism, analysts
have praised Oracle’s ability to integrate, rather than
merely bundle, their acquisitions. Building out tighter
connections with sales, service, and commerce capabilities would make the solution even more compelling.
WEAKNESSES
Despite a strong commitment to integration, Oracle
has a growing number of disparate cloud components
that can frustrate end-to-end business objectives
even as they rack up impressive revenue — for Oracle. The acquisition-heavy strategy means that Oracle
users can face a waiting period before pioneering capabilities can be tested in the marketplace.
IBM
IBM
is credited with being the first
company to muse publicly
about building a unified digital marketing hub. Given big
blue’s history, it’s fitting that it today offers marketing hubs in two distinctly different flavors. That
makes for a complex product portfolio, but hedges
IBM’s interests in public cloud solutions, as well as
old-style, on-premise, and private cloud systems.
Our 2014 marketing clouds review focused on
what was then IBM’s core digital marketing solution,
built around its acquisition of Unica. Unica software,
now IBM Marketing Software, was fundamentally
an on-premise solution, but only in the loose sense
of the term was it a “marketing cloud.”
Big blue’s new entrant, IBM Marketing Cloud, is
based on the Silverpop marketing software platform,
acquired by IBM in 2014 for $270 million. The Unicabased IBM Marketing Software suite lives on, but
the real story to watch in this space is the evolution of
the IBM Marketing Cloud. To Silverpop’s core capabilities in email marketing, marketing automation, and
audience insights, IBM has added technologies such
as the data-aggregating, retargeting Universal Behavior Exchange, and the Xtify mobile personalization
engine. A partnership with Allocadia for marketing
budget and expense planning rolled out in Q3 2015.
Analysts have taken a generally favorable view
of the newer cloud approach. In April 2015, Gartner
rated IBM among the six leaders in multichannel
campaign management, and Forrester notes improvement as well.
“IBM has made strides since our last evaluation in
its cloud version with better mobility, simpler practitioner tools, tighter security, and stronger content
integration,” says “The Forrester Wave: Digital Experience Platforms, Q4 2015.”
STRENGTHS
Silverpop was known for flexible customization and
strong email marketing roots, so direct marketers
can find a lot to like here. The acquisition did more
than give IBM a modern cloud solution, though — it
provided crucial marketing credibility.
“It wasn’t just picking up Silverpop, but the partners and digital agencies that do the marketing work
for clients,” Nucleus Research’s Wettemann says.
“That’s made the Silverpop acquisition great for IBM.”
IBM’s breadth of functionality has been steadily growing, and sophisticated new arrivals such as
Journey Designer and Universal Behavior Exchange
join already powerful capabilities in business intelligence and digital marketing. One underexploited area
of strength is Watson Analytics, the natural language
data tool which is available for free business trial.
“The role of AI decisioning in the marketing suite
is still in its infancy, and there’s real economic power
there,” Frank notes.
WEAKNESSES
Corporate marketing needs are not one-size-fits-all,
but IBM’s decision to straddle effort across two distinct
marketing hubs could draw focus away from pushing
just one segment to achieve outsized success.
“It’s difficult to maintain parallel development
tracks, but there is some justification to the idea
that marketing needs different things in a B2B and
B2C environment, which tends to be the way IBM
distinguishes those two solutions,” Frank explains.
Neither the IBM Marketing Software (Unica) clients
nor the IBM Marketing Cloud (Silverpop) users should
fear waking up to an end-of-life product, however.
“I’m not anticipating any large moves that would
strand customers, I don’t think they could afford to
make a mistake like that, but there are a lot of incentives for them to come up with a path that rationalizes and converges the solutions,” he adds.
HP
Andrew Joiner, GM of HP Software
H
ewlett Packard made a tremendous marketing cloud splash with the $11 billion (yes,
billion) acquisition of Autonomy, before it
virtually disappeared from view as it retrenched and then split itself apart — a reorganization completed as recently as November 2015. HP
(now separate from Hewlett Packard Enterprise,
the IT enterprise products and solutions business),
is declaring itself open for another pass, and insists
that the transition has not been wasted time.
“Over the past year we have been able to assemble some unique assets and bring them under
one stewardship and direction,” confirms Andrew
Joiner, GM of HP Software.
Joiner says the exclusive focus on business solutions at the new company will make it easier to tell
the HP marketing hub story. Put simply, purchased
technologies such as the Autonomy core, TeamSite
CMS, and Optimost content and paid media campaign tool, can join with homegrown solutions — like
the Aurasma augmented reality platform — to create unique advantages for marketers.
“Most of these applications were pioneers in
their space, and the digital marketing hub is tying
them together,” Joiner shares.
HP is pushing heavily for customers to use its capabilities to do more marketing based on predictive analytics, and with good reason. Precise targeting means
that a buyer doesn’t actually need to do anything —
even take action to signal buying intent — before triggering the delivery of content relevant to his interests.
“Today, content is served up automatically
through Netflix and Apple TV. The content finds
them, and marketers need to think about those
things going forward,” Joiner explains.
STRENGTHS
HP’s big data bona fides are hard to ignore, and its predictive and targeting capabilities remain impressive, but
strong, native data tools are becoming table stakes in
the marketing cloud space. If HP can do as it plans, and
bring innovative marketing technologies like augmented reality to mainstream campaigns, it will give it a new
and unique card to play in the competitive discussion.
WEAKNESSES
Has HP already lost too much momentum? After
branding HP as a “Niche Player” in the “2014 Magic
Quadrant for Digital Marketing Hubs,” Gartner will
not even feature HP in the 2015 edition. Frank says
HP will need more than just a strong story to catch
up with the rest of the market.
“There are a lot of opportunities to acquire one’s
way into this market, which I think they will have to
do — given the speed at which things are moving,”
he says. “They need to assemble more quality offerings to compete with the likes of Oracle, IBM, Adobe,
and Salesforce.”
Concluding The Hub’s 2014 marketing cloud review,
editor-in-chief Omar Akhtar wrote: “Since they
can’t offer all the solutions at once, each company has made a different bet on what it will focus on.
Adobe is playing to its historical strength of content
creation and data; Salesforce is all about social and
CRM integration. Oracle has two great platforms for
multichannel marketing; IBM has overall dominance in
commerce; and HP is placing its bets on big data.”
Has the landscape changed that much? In some
ways, no. Adobe and Salesforce have maintained
their positions in the market and improved the clarity of their offerings. On the other hand, Oracle and
IBM have made significant advances, with IBM really entering an unadulterated cloud product in the
stakes for the first time. As for HP, we’ll have to wait
and see.
At Oracle Openworld this year, co-CEO Mark Hurd
predicted that by 2027 two marketing suite providers would command 80% of the market. Maybe so,
but it’s still too soon to pick the long-term winners.
– Kim Davis