Still No Leaders or Challengers in Gartner's EMM Magic Quadrant

Once again, vendors in the enterprise marketing management (EMM) space, were confined to Niche and Visionary quadrant in Gartner's EMM Magic Quadrant released earlier this month. No vendors were recognized as Challengers or Leaders in this space, which Kimberly Collins, managing vice president at Gartner and co-author of the report, attributes largely to weak user adoption. The organizational need for a complete, well-rounded understanding of the marketing mix, however, will continue to press for an enterprise-wide marketing solution.

"For the most part, people aren't buying a whole big chunk of stuff right now," Collins states matter-of-factly. This makes sense given the fact that many marketers either don't have the capital budgets to make such an investment, or they're focusing instead of pointed areas of success, rather than trying to cover the whole gamut of capabilities.

Gartner defines EMM as "business strategies, process automation, and technologies required to effectively operate a marketing department, align resources, execute customer-centric strategies and improve marketing performance."

From a vendor perspective, it's becoming difficult to compete in a space where 80 to 90 percent of the functionality the average marketer needs is similar across all companies. Where the competitive differentiation will come in is, of course, in that remaining percentage. This is where companies are working to either develop innovative solutions or hone in on specific vertical industries.

Niche Players:

• Alterian;
• Infor; and
• Teradata.

Visionaries:

• Aprimo;
• Oracle (Siebel); 
• SAP; 
• SAS; and
• Unica.

When it comes to EMM, vendors that "have it all" may be hindered for the same reasons they've grown-when functionalities are achieved via acquisition, vendors may be working with integration issues around the platform, architecture, code base, etc. Given these potential obstacles, she says, it can be more challenging for a company that's looking to adopt a solution.  

"There's a lot of vision," Collins says of the EMM market, "but not a lot of productization." The trends she sees as vendors continue to move forward is a stronger focus on:

• marketing performance management (MPM);
• vertical industry solutions; and
• a refocusing on harder-to-measure traditional marketing assets, namely, brand awareness, brand monitoring and listening.

Companies today, particularly due to the economic climate, are hard pressed to deliver quantifiable results. With smaller budgets, teams within marketing are trying to defend their voice in the company. "Everyone's a firm believer in what they're doing," Collins says, explaining that it would be foolish to, for example, scrap all traditional media in order to invest in digital simply because it's more measurable. "The reality is you don't really know what's driving revenue and value, how it's performing, how it interacts with each other," she says. That's where enterprise marketing management comes in, helping marketers understand the performance and relationship between campaigns.

Though no one has cracked into the Leader or Challenger quadrant just yet, Collins says the Visionaries have the most potential. These vendors are "reinventing themselves, thinking more outside the box," she says. The question, then, is who will come to market-and get market adoption-first. Smaller, niche players, will find it difficult to "catapult" themselves into a leader position, and will most likely get there as a result of a merger or acquisition.

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