Marketing Technology Landscape 2014

Two days back Scott Brinker published Marketing Technology Landscape for 2014. This is the third edition of his widely appreciated and popular marketing technology landscapes. This version includes about 950 marketing technology companies into 43 categories across 6 major classes. These companies mainly provide software and tools for marketers. This is 600 more than year 2012 and ~9 times compared to year 2011.

You can download high-resolution PDF version from here otherwise you can also access the PNG version here.

Six Classes of Marketing Technologies

One of the best takeaways in this edition is logical classification (6 classes) and clear categorisation (43 categories) of marketing technologies. These 6 classes are described as,

1. Internet, mainly as marketing environment.
2. Infrastructure, to support the marketing activities and IT side of it such as databases, big data management, cloud, mobile and web development tools/frameworks.
3. Backbone platforms, traditional marketing platforms acting as backbone of all marketing activities like CRM, Marketing Automation, WCM, and E-commerce.
4. Marketing Middleware, acting as glue and integrating various products. This class includes Data Management Platforms(DMP), Customer Data Platforms(CDP), Tag Management, User Management, Cloud Connection and most importantly API Management.
5. Marketing Experience, specialised technologies powering different parts of experience management. This includes 18 different categories, covering advertising, SEO, personalisation and social media marketing, etc.
6. Marketing Operations, last but not least tools and technologies to manage back-office activities of marketing teams more efficiently. Some interesting categories included in this class are agile and project marketing, digital asset management.

Some takeaways

Make sure you read Scott’s commentary on his landscape for this year. Because I am less of marketer and more a technologist, I would like to comment on few things here.

API Platforms for Digital Transformation

For me the most interesting category was API Platforms. API Management platforms like apogee, 3scale, Layer7 and MASHERY are real game changer. These API platforms enable digital transformation in an enterprise environment.

Specialised marketing technologies

As you can see big players like Google, Oracle, Adobe, IBM are everywhere, but landscape is mainly dominated by specialised marketing tools and technologies.

This comes as no surprise to me. Although big players are pushing marketing and experience management suits very aggressively but I don’t believe they are anywhere close to offer a complete packaged solution. I suspect in 2014 more and more small and medium sized companies will be aqui-hired by big players as focus moves on specialised marketing technologies.

Finally, an excellent and commendable effort by Scott. It take a lot of energy to put something like this.