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Tony Byrne on the Right Way to Select Marketing Technology
| MarTech Today | Is There a Right Way to Buy Marketing Technology? (Short Answer: Yes)

Selection teams should focus on their own user stories rather than generic vendor reference implementations. MarTech West speaker Tony Byrne will host a workshop on purchasing strategies April 15.

In twenty years as an industry analyst evaluating martech vendor platforms, I’ve witnessed hundreds of enterprises try to make good technology purchase decisions. All too often they get it wrong.

You can’t blame those decision-makers. Marketers in particular face intense time pressures and can’t readily find good templates for doing this right.  Stress around making a poor choice sometimes leads to ill-advised short-cuts or paralyzing over-analysis. Read More... 

 

Apoorv Durga on Why the MarTech Stack Matters
| Impact Magazine | The MarTech Stack, Why it Should Matter

As we step into a new decade, we are also stepping towards an era driven by technology. As digital media is getting expensive due to competition, premium brands are looking to derive greater ad spend returns, transparency and connected views with the help of marketing technologies.
 
A Grand View Research report estimates that the global marketing automation software market is expected to reach $7.63 billion by 2025. As per industry estimates, over 60% of marketing leaders the world over are now using at least one marketing automation platform.
 
MarTech, which has been adopted in a big way in India, is expected to grow at a CAGR of 44% for the next five years. With a projected $250-300 million opportunity in India, the country is certainly riding a MarTech wave... Read More. 

 

Tony Byrne Describes a Changing CDP Marketplace in 2020
| CMSWire | Will the CDP Marketplace Consolidate in 2020?

Last month IgnitionOne, a longtime database marketing / adtech / CDP vendor, announced it planned to liquidate. The vendor had already shed much of its adtech portfolio over the past few years, so what remained was essentially a CDP with a managed services business. Unable to secure that financing or find a buyer for what remained, CEO Will Margiloff told shareholders he needed to shut the doors.
 
An obvious question ensues: Does this mean consolidation is coming to the CDP market?  
 
I don't think IgnitionOne is a canary in a coalmine, but as an existing or potential CDP customer, you'll want to understand some of the dynamics here... Read More. 

 

Tony Byrne on Acquia's Acquisition of AgilOne
| Tech Crunch | Acquia nabs CDP startup AgilOne, which raised $41M

Acquia announced it has acquired customer data platform (CDP) startup AgilOne today. The companies did not disclose the purchase price.
 
CDPs are all the rage among customer experience vendors, as they provide a way to pull data from a variety of channels to build a more complete picture of the customer. The goal here is to deliver meaningful content to the customer based on what you know about them. Having a platform like this to draw upon makes it more likely that you will hit the target more accurately... Read More. 

 

Tony Byrne on the The Rise of Omni-Channel Content Platforms
| Document Strategy | The Rise of Omni-Channel Content Platforms

While many industry pundits have focused on traditional enterprise content management (ECM) vendors transitioning from document management to content services platforms, a parallel, and potentially a more interesting, trend has been taking place in the customer experience (CX) world.
 
Over the past few years, we’ve seen the rise of a new category of platforms that are designed to supply core content to the ever-growing channels of customer engagement. After extensive research here at Real Story Group, we’ve labeled this modern class of tools as omni-channel content platforms. Emerging primarily from the digital asset management (DAM) arena, some key technologies have also spun off from the headless web content management and marketing asset management markets... Read More. 

 

Tony Byrne on the Importance of MarTech Collaboration and Integration
| ChiefMarTec | Two Themes for Martech Stack Leaders: Collaboration and Integration

Earlier this autumn, Real Story Group convened two-dozen martech/CX stack owners from among our larger subscribers for two days of confidential discussions around what’s working well (and less well) within their enterprises. Although the conversations were private, we were able to share 12 key takeaways.
 
Reflecting some more on those 48 hours together, I think it’s worth highlighting two larger meta-themes that Scott has already been riffing on this year: collaboration and integration. Read More. 

 

Tony Byrne on the new Salesforce Content Management System
| Tech Crunch | Salesforce announces new content management system

Salesforce has its fingers in a lot of parts of the customer experience, so why not content management? Today, the company announced a brand new tool called Salesforce  Content Management System, which it says is designed from the ground up to deliver a quality customer experience across multiple channels.
 
The idea is to provide a way for customers to create, manage and deliver more meaningful content across multiple channels from within the Salesforce family of products. The company claims it doesn’t require any kind of deep technical knowledge to do it, meaning marketers and product people should be able to create and deliver content without the help of IT, once the system is properly set up. Read More. 

 

Tony Byrne on the Microsoft Acquisition of Mover, and Implications of Cloud Mig…
| Tech Crunch | Microsoft acquires Mover to help with Microsoft 365 cloud migration

Microsoft wants to make it as easy as possible to migrate to Microsoft 365, and today the company announced it had purchased a Canadian startup called Mover to help. The companies did not reveal the acquisition price.
 
Microsoft 365 is the company’s bundle that includes Office 365, Microsoft Teams, security tools and workflow. The idea is to provide customers with a soup-to-nuts, cloud-based productivity package. Mover helps customers get files from another service into the Microsoft 365 cloud. Read More. 

 

Tony Byrne on System Complexity as a Variable in CMS Selection
| CMSWire | How to Categorize the Web CMS Marketplace

The web content and digital experience (WCM) marketplace is highly fragmented. That's analyst-speak for: you'll find a hell of a lot of WCM vendors out there. Real Story Group's vendor evaluations cover nearly three-dozen WCM players, but you can source hundreds more around the globe. In fact, this profusion represents one of the consistent themes in the market over the past two decades. Read More. 
Tony Byrne's Speculation on Adobes Acquisition Proved Prescient
| Tech Crunch | Ten years after Adobe bought Omniture, the deal comes into clearer focus

Ten years ago this week, Adobe acquired Omniture for $1.8 billion. At the time, Adobe was a software company selling boxed software like Dreamweaver, Flash and Photoshop to creatives. Many people were baffled by the move, not realizing that purchasing a web analytics company was really the first volley in a full company transformation to the cloud and a shift in focus from consumer to enterprise.
 
It would take many years for the full vision to unfold, so you can forgive people for not recognizing the implications of the acquisition at the time, but CEO Shantanu Narayen seemed to give an inkling of what he had in mind. “This is a game-changer for both Adobe and our customers. We will enable advertisers, media companies and e-tailers to realize the full value of their digital assets,” he said in a statement after the acquisition became public. Read More. 

 

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Recent Press Releases

Real Story Group Finds CDPs from Major MarTech Vendors Still Lag the Market
Real Story Group Charts the Rise of Omnichannel Content Platforms
Real Story Group Publishes New Customer Data Platform (CDP) Vendor Evaluations
New Book Applies Design Thinking to Tech Procurement
New Research Charts Employee Experience Tech Landscape

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