Vendors Focus on Marketing

Enterprises are expected to focus more on the marketing component of CRM and to begin consolidating stovepiped marketing functions into marketing technology portfolios, according to the latest report from META Group covering enterprise marketing portfolio management (EMM). EMM comprises the processes involved in planning, executing, monitoring, and managing an organization's marketing efforts. "The increased attention on marketing is due to two main causes," says Elizabeth Roche, vice president with META Group's Technology Research Services and lead author of the report. "One is the fact that ROI in marketing has been hard to discern, and if CRM can help better target and drive down the costs of expensive direct marketing campaigns, it's a huge win. Also, marketing firms usually have more discretionary resources, and if CRM tools can help prove the value of marketing efforts, that's a high value to the company as well." During the next year organizations will seek to mitigate the lost leverage associated with the lack of visibility into customer interactions across all channels and lines of business, according to the report. "Marketing is here to stay and will continue to evolve and be more integrated within the CRM suites," Roche says. "While it was always the Achilles heel of CRM vendors who focused mostly on operational CRM, these vendors now see the importance of marketing since it is the lead end of the customer lifecycle. It's how you engage customers, and sales simply follows the marketing lead." The "METAspectrum Enterprise Marketing Portfolio Management Market Summary" evaluates 16 vendors. The EMM market is well-distributed among leaders, challengers, and followers. Leaders exhibit excellence in several key areas: EMM vision and core competency, mind share, business model support, feature/function, depth of marketing knowledge in professional services, technology/architecture, and viability. Leaders include Siebel Systems, Unica, and E.piphany. Challengers are divided into three distinct clusters. The first cluster shows special strength in market presence criteria, and includes Aprimo, PeopleSoft, SAS, and Teradata. The CRM suite players in the second cluster, which includes Chordiant, Oracle, and SAP AG, have continued to invest in enhancing their EMM capabilities, improving their offerings, and generating positive momentum. Vendors in the third cluster, which includes Amdocs, DoubleClick, Pivotal, and Vignette, have all enhanced their EMM capabilities via recent M&A activity. Followers include vendors that may have sufficient products in one or more application domains, but do not have the needed breadth and depth across all EMM domains. Onyx and KANA are listed in this category. Organizations will be further challenged by new regulations like the national Do Not Call Registry. According to Roche, by 2006 marketing application vendors will expand their footprints to incorporate marketing portfolio concepts, placing a high premium on integration with the rest of the CRM technology system.

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