Here are several excerpts from an article by Barney Beal, News Director with SearchCRM.com, Gartner Enterprise Marketing Management Rankings Show Room For Growth:
There are no leaders in the market for enterprise marketing management, according to Gartner Inc.
The Stamford, Conn.-based research firm recently issued a Magic Quadrant for the (Enterprise Marketing Management) market and found all eight vendors lacking.
That shouldn’t be surprising, given the relative immaturity of enterprise marketing management.
“It’s still emerging,” said Kimberly Collins, managing vice president of Gartner CRM. There’s probably less than 5% adoption.”
Gartner named Unica, Aprimo, SAS, Oracle’s Siebel application and SAP as visionaries (i.e. they have a strong vision for developing a platform and have a broad focus on marketing functionality). Teradata, Infor, Alterian and Oracle’s E-Business Suite and PeopleSoft applications were ranked as niche players (i.e. they perform well in a small segment of the market).
Each vendor has some aspect of a marketing platform — for example, marketing resource management (MRM) or campaign management — though none has all the functions required to be a leader or a challenger. Therefore, companies have no choice but to purchase marketing technology piecemeal. Marketing technology vendors have generally matured from one core competency, and anyone seeking a marketing platform may have to make trade-offs in other areas, Collins said. Success will depend not just on the vendor understanding a company’s processes but on the company understanding them itself.
“The real key to success in any of this is understanding your processes,” Collins said. “You can’t make a good decision on a solution if you don’t start to document the processes and exactly what you want to do with that solution. In the past, that caused a lot of the CRM failures. People didn’t define their processes before they automated them. They depended on the vendors.”
