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| CMS Wire | Tony Byrne on CDP's enabling marketers to be able to perform marketing tasks without the support of IT

Tony Byrne, founder of Real Story Group, which helps enterprises make technology decisions said it’s a big win for speed-to-market and adaptiveness, "if IT or some sort of data office has been building and activating segments so far, and the CDP is able to successfully enable marketers to do this themselves." Read More.


| LinkedIn | What MarTech Stack Leaders Think About Operations

The latest meeting of Real Story Group's private MarTech Leadership Council centered around marketing and creative operations in the wake of the pandemic. The session included a case study from a Fortune 50 consumer goods firm along with some RSG analysis. These meetings are confidential, so I can't share all the juicy details and side conversations, but below I'll offer a general overview of some team findings.

This topic was particularly apropos following a Council meeting earlier this year on "Content Supply and Demand Chains." Looking at full-cycle processes inevitably takes you to considerations around operations. When it comes to MarTech operations, there's a wide range of topics to discuss! Here's a sampling of where enterprise stack leaders generally concurred. Read More.


| CMS Wire | Does Your Martech Stack Inspire Joy?

By nearly every measure, marketing technology stacks are getting more cluttered. Stack leaders and ops managers need to manage a wider set of tools, across a growing number of channels, while getting bombarded with pitches for new capabilities from vendors and colleagues alike.

Meanwhile, stack leaders face pressure from business executives and sometimes IT leadership to rationalize their environments and justify incremental spend. Read More.


| CMS Wire | 7 Insights Into Crownpeak's Acquisition of e-Spirit

Tony Byrne, CEO and founder of Real Story Group, which provides WCM technology assessments and strategies for buyers, is skeptical of a successful CMS “combination platter approach.” He told CMSWire there is no “combination play” in this market.

Byrne cited what he deemed as failed examples, some going back decades:

Mediasurface: The original combination platter was, which had three different CMS tools, Byrne noted. That failed, he said, and they all died via Alterian and then SDL.

Divine: Roll-up tech company divine had three different CMS tools, also on purpose. All died except for Content Server, which went to Oracle via FatWire. FatWire killed its own homegrown CMS when they bought Content Server from divine, another failed combination, according to Byrne.

Episerver-Ektron: We did find Ektron still with a heartbeat as recently as last June. But there is no denying Episerver's lobbying efforts to get Ektron users to abandon ship and get on Episerver (which is now Optimizely).

OpenText: OpenText at one time sold and managed five different WCM tools:  Gauss, Obtree, RedDot, Vignette, TeamSite.

"In the examples of killed-by-roll-up systems, I cannot recall a single time where the vendor did not say, ‘We are going to support the new system...things will work out well...synergies…" Byrne said. "They have to say that. And they are always, always lying."

Read the complete article  ➤

 

| CMS Wire | Whatever Happened to Your Company's Pre-Pandemic Plans?

When COVID-19 happened, enterprises had to shift their priorities to focus on serving their immediate needs of their customers and employees while ensuring everyone’s safety. Companies previously carefully crafted plans were put on hold in the wake of the pandemic.

In this article, Tony Byrne, founder of Real Story Group, talked about how the large, global enterprises who subscribe to RSG research view the impact of COVID-19.

“They typically haven’t perceived the pandemic as a major break-point, but more of an accelerator,” he said. “In other words, they are not coming out of the pandemic with some new or revived agenda, but rather, an updated urgency around pre-existing digital transformation initiatives. They have to execute them faster now.”

Organizations are having to become more efficient, decisive, flexible and transparent in how they run their businesses and in how they interact with their customers and employees — and rapidly. Byrne also noted that several RSG Council members are forming strategic task forces to respond to anticipated long-term behavioral shifts, which will then significantly impact those organization’s stack architectures. Read the complete article.


| Diginomica | Scott Brinker and Tony Byrne shared their latest thinking on how to future-proof your MarTech stack

Think you finally got a handle on MarTech? Think again. Looking back on this year's MarTech 2020 event, two sessions on marketing trends raised the stakes: how do you future-proof your MarTech stack? Scott Brinker and Tony Byrne shared their latest thinking. Read More.

diginomica

| MarTech Today | Pure open source development is not the future of martech

Byrne, on the other hand, says that the real problem of deploying open source across the martech space is that it’s not really a suitable foundation for creating SaaS apps which live in a multi-tenant cloud.

Open source software is typically downloaded by developers, “massaged,” then delivered back to the community. By it’s nature, it’s single tenant, Byrne explained. “If you’re in the cloud, you’re paying Azure or Amazon or somebody. The cloud is designed around a service model not a software licensing model, whereas open source is all about the software licensing and getting access to the single tenant. You don’t typically see open source solutions built cloud natively, from the ground up.”

 

| MarTech Today | Best practices for making martech purchases in the next fiscal year

Less than a week away from the start of the new fiscal year for many businesses on July 1, IT and marketing departments have already started their annual tug-of-war over martech purchasing platforms, tools and vendors. 

What are the best practices when buying martech for the 2021 fiscal year? It may be easier than you think.

 

| Exchange 4 Media | e4m MarTech India Bridge1: Industry leaders discuss innovations in marketing technologies

Keynote presentation was given by Jarrod Gingras- Managing Director & Analyst, Real Story Group, on the topic 'The state-of-the-art Martech Stack: What it looks and how it works”.

During his presentation, Gingras explained, “Ideal customer engagement is right content to the right person in the right context at the right time and measure the effectiveness." 

 

| CMS Wire | How to Build the Right Digital Experience Stack for Your Business

While Byrne sees the benefits of using core elements of the DX stack from the key vendors, he is not a proponent of using a single vendor. “You may want to ‘anchor’ your stack with key vendors, like Salesforce for CRM and Adobe for Analytics or whatever, but you do not want to consign your stack to a single vendor. This is a cop-out and your customers will suffer,” said Byrne.

 

| MarTech Today | How to build a martech stack for this era — and whatever comes next

Miller echoed the exact sentiment around demos that Real Story Group Founder Tony Byrne discussed during his keynote talk on buying martech and the process he uses to evaluate technology.

 

| CMS Wire | What Does HubSpot's New CMS Say About Its Martech Future?

"HubSpot has been making a play as a mid-market suite for some time, according to Tony Byrne, CEO and founder of Real Story Group. Byrne said the HubSpot CMS Hub is likely to be of interest only to existing Hubspot licensees and not the market more broadly. 'Even then,' he added, 'RSG always counsels never defaulting to a solution just because it comes from an incumbent vendor. Other WCM platforms can integrate with HubSpot's CRM and MAP (marketing automation platform) offerings as well.'"

 

| 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

 

| 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

 

| 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

 

| 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

 

| 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

 

| 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

 

| 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

 

| 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