Orbis Publishes its FY Results 2008/2009

Orbis one of the visionary in the MRM Magic Quadrant have published on Aug 10 2009 their FY 2008/2009 results.

Couple of highlights from their website

1. Orbis completed significant implementations with Telefonica O2 in the UK and Telstra in Australia. Both of these projects were very large in user numbers and complexity, involving rapid deployments and integrations with other key business systems.
2. Royal Dutch Shell expanded its Orbis deployment in Retail Marketing, adding a Marketing Financials Management solution across 50 countries, enabling real-time management and visibility across all activities related to its global retail marketing spend.

For More Read

http://www.orbisglobal.com/Content_Common/ns-OrbisRevealsGlobalSuccessFY08/09.seo

Presentation by Marketing Operations Partners

MRM solution to New challenges of Media Planning

One of the recent post in MarketingGovernance New Media? New Processes highlights the problem faced by current marketers. Two things that make it important to mention

1. How Media Planning have changed over the period?
2. How ineffective mechanism are being used by marketers to solve new challenges?

As the post correctly highlight that focus today is more on efficient campaign execution using narrow means of media channel instead of broadcasting channel such TV, Radio, Newspaper etcetra. Today marketers are spending more on channels which targets to the customer directly in an individual manner then on mass manner.

But the post highlight the most important aspect that even though the challenges surfaced in the twenty first century for marketers are far from conventional but the approach taken by the marketers remind of Nineteenth century Industrial revolution. The following are the issue

1. Inefficient Marketing process or no process.
2. Ignorance towards technology.

The solution to above mentioned issue is MOM/MRM. MOM not only introduces efficient and effective process but also ways to measure the effectiveness of the process. It provides a framework/infrastructure to set up efficient processes to streamline various marketing activities.

New Challenges for MOM/MRM/EMM Vendors

Recently a top executive from a leading MRM vendor while discussing the challenges for MRM vendor brought the following point. Let me quote her

“As MRM or EMM becomes more comprehensive and the feature set becomes more complex, there is increasing pressure from the customers to make it easy to use. Its a huge challenge for vendors to provide this comprehensive, complex feature in an easy to use manner.”

This is a sign of maturity within the MRM/EMM segment.  Its been more than decade when this domain came into existense and as the time passed away the domain as a whole have become more mature and moving towards commoditization. Now the focus is not merely on the functionality but also on other aspects of functionality which is culmination of technology and other factors.

Today MRM/EMM solution are expected to

1. Scalable for SaaS model.
2. Intuitive to use.
3. Comprehensive in Functionality.
4. Inter Operable with any Enterprise Systems.

Apart from these challenges the major challenges the vendors are facing is increased pressure from IT department of the customer who are adding different dimension to the entire deployment or solution. Some of the challenges are

1. Integration with existing Identity management.
2. In house deployment for customer.
3. Strict SLA requirements.

Organisation are looking MRM/EMM more as comprehensive solution to provide insight not only into their marketing resource but also resource related to marketing which has now brought things such as procurement management, agency governance and others into the bigger picture of MRM/EMM. The challenge lies not to implement these as part of the solution but how to leverage the existing resources for such additional areas for a deloyment.

One of the areas where I found the MRM/EMM segment to be weak is reluctance of vendors to come at a platform to make standards. There should be more co-operation among the vendors to bring more value to segment keeping aside their corporate rivalry. Currently the segment is define more by the analyst then by the vendors who are implementing the solution. Unless the vendors come together on a common platform it will be hard to find the change in wind.

One of the other areas that need some attention from the vendors is investment on the research & development for the solution. Thought this year Gartner report does mention some of the vendors investing for the same. But more need to done. Thanks to Frans Riemersma for introducing the first book on the MRM. We need more such effort for commoditization of the entire MRM from being a niche solutions.

Marketing 2.0

Marketing Automation has seen a decade of maturity. Now marketers have got the entire marketing processes in place in culmination with technologies like MOM/MRM/EMM/COM.

It’s now time to move on and start the next generation for Marketing Automation. It’s Marketing 2.0 or Marketing 2G or let me use my creativity to depict it as

Last decade have defined the basic framework for marketing automation. The framework is rock solid and reached a level of maturity that now we can build the next generation to enhance & improve overall marketing and bring a paradigm shift in the way Marketers work now.

The key to next generation of marketing will be how marketers get adapted to the new rules of technology and leverage these as new channels. The alchemy will also be how marketers become more cost effective and instead of cost center to an organization become more as a business unit with focused and more result oriented approach.

Days are gone about spending lavishly and not getting accounted for that, in this age where economic meltdown happens more frequently then the President taking re-oath, it is those marketers who adapts to the new rule will be the SlumDog Millionaire and sing Jai Ho (Oscar winner).

Let me take one of the new things that have hit the world in recent past. One of thing that has happen due to Web 2.0 is more options for media channels have surfaced for marketers. And one of those medium is the increase of VIDEO as a prominent media channel.

Increase popularity of YouTube was the beginning. In one of the recent survey done by online magazine most of marketers would like to increase investment in video as a channel. Let me just list down how video can be leveraged by marketers

a.       Product Launch Video. Campaign such as Mr. Fong by IBM recently.

b.      Email campaigns using video email instead of conventional text based mail.

c.       Blogs using Video or Vlogs.

d.      Promotion of product launches on social media networking such as YouTube using video.

e.      Online Video Magazines or VZines.

Already many of the visionaries in the market have already started adapting to this new mode of media channel. One of the problem that marketers may face is

a.       Whether current technologies such MRM/MOM/EMM/COM support such infrastructure or planning to support.

b.      Define the methodology to measure the effectiveness of new media.

c.       Whether the core infrastructure apart from North America supports high bandwidth to reach out beyond the continent?

Though at present Video is the major channel that I see which will play major role in next couple of years apart from the mobile. The early adopters will initially may struggle to justify the expense but on a longer period it will be worth investment.

Journey 2003 to 2009: MRM Magic Quadrant

 

The Gartner MRM Magic Quadrant for 2009 is released couple of weeks back. We all now know where all the current MRM vendors stand. 

Considering the hype of Gartner Quadrant,  this year I decided to do a flashback and let everyone walk through the journey of Gartner Magic Quadrant since 2003. Though my journey is incomplete as I was not able to gather 2004 & 2005 magic quadrant.

MRM Magic Quadrant 2003-2009

**Leaders & New Entrants are highlighted. 

Analysis

1. Aprimo is a Leader throughout.
2. Out of the 13 vendors in 2003,only 4 survived till 2009 as an entity. They were Aprimo, Assetlink, BrandWizard and Unica. Others got acquired/merged or went missing.
3. Out of the four Assetlink was the one which moved from Niche Player to the Leader quadrant.
4. Unica moved from Visionary to Leader.
5. BrandWizard moved from Niche Player to Visionary.

If someone can share the 2004 & 2005 magic quadrant with me,it will make the journey a complete.  One more thing,if someone find any discrepancies then please let me know. 

Thanks to google which helped to find all these reports in different form.

Another Marketing Automation Vendor:SyncForce

SyncForce, develop new sales and marketing drives under the motto “Innovating Commercial Operations™”.  The entire Commerical Operations Management(COM) is a new concept to me and thanks to Hans de Gier of SyncForce for assisting to understand the concept. As part of my effort of increasing awareness about the marketing automation I have used this space to share the knowledge among marketers.

According to SyncForce, COM is a platform for consistent sales and marketing in all functional areas that includes

1. Brand.
2.  Innovation
3.  Marketing
4.  Segment
5.  Channel
6.  Pricing
7. Account management

Hans has shared this powerful presentation to make the world understand their vision towards marketing automation.

Effect of Economic Crisis

More than one year old the Sub Prime effect has found its first victim the Lehman Brothers. There was ripple effect after that across the world economies. The European, the Asian government, the US government acted as per their norms to save the shattering economy.

It will be very early to predict what will be the effect on the MRM-MOM-EMM side but Enterprise will become more selective in their choice of implementation of the marketing platform. To me this is completely opposite what an enterprise should do. It is the right time to use such tool to have a check on the marketing expense and also have tight control on the marketing expenditure.

Enterprise which have already implemented MRM will benefit a lot as they can foresee which campaign ot of all can be stopped or perform re-allocation of their budget based on their need. From the MRM perspective it should be simple using such tool to make a proposal for efficient cost cutting across marketing department.

Compare to this an enterprise without such tool will have an adverse impact as to find out which campaign should be stopped as this will take huge effort and cost to generate such report and take decision. It may be possible due to lack such tool wrong decisions can be taken or entire marketing budget can be taken away.

Enterprise with such tool will be in better position to make a right decision and generate effective and right leads even in the time of meltdown.

I would recommend enterprise small/medium/big who haven’t thought of implementing such tool should exercise the SaaS option provided by the vendor which is cost effective and enjoy even at such bad times.

Happy Birthday to Blog

Its been a year that I have started blogging on the world of MRM/MOM. Thanks to everyone for their support. I would especially thanks the following person for their support in providing the information

1. Alan Bunce,Unica.
2. Kate Taylor , OrbisGlobal
3. Sunita Shetty and Mohan Sinha, Assetlink
4. Roy Dewell from http://www.mrm-explained.com
5. Frans Riemersma, MarketingGovernance.com
6. Oscar Bernel, http://www.enterprisemarketingplatform.com
7. Peter Mahoney, mycmonetwork.blogspot.com

It was a great journey till now. I believe in coming year I will able to contribute to the MRM-MOM community in a much better manner then before.

MOM/MRM-CRM Integration

MOM/MRM-CRM is the need of hour. Every enterprise which is planning to leverage the use of MRM/MOM is looking for such integration.

Though many vendors like Aprimo, Unica, Assetlink, Orbis do claim that they have successfully done such integration or have the ability to such integration seamessly due to their flexible architecture. I have certain proposal

1. Can we have well defined Marketing Service interface?
2. These interface will become de-facto standard like BPM standards?
3. System Integrator who would like to integrate CRM with MRM system can do that without the knowledge of the product.
4. Unlike CRM which is mature but still not having standards, MRM/MOM will have standard to publish data in uniform manner.
5. This would also allow more implementation of MRM/MOM and making a technology like CRM.