Ranking B2B Marketing Automation Vendors: Part 3

Summary: The first two posts in this series described my scoring for product fit. The third and final post describes scoring for vendor strength. And I'll give a little preview of the charts these scores produce...without product names attached.Beyond assessing a vendor's current product, buyers also want to understand the current and future market position of the vendor itself. I had much less data to work with relating to vendor strength and...

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Ranking B2B Marketing Automation Vendors: Part 2

Summary: Yesterday's post described the objectives of my product fit scores for B2B marketing automation vendors and how I set up the original weighting for individual elements. But the original set of scores seemed to favor more complex products, even for small business marketers. Here's how I addressed the problem.Having decided that my weights needed adjusting, I wanted an independent assessment of which features were most appropriate for each...

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Ranking B2B Marketing Automation Vendors: How I Built My Scores (part 1)

Summary: The first of three posts describing my new scoring system for B2B marketing automation vendors.I’ve finally had time to work up the vendor scores based on the 150+ RFP questions I distributed back in September. The result will be one of those industry landscape charts that analysts seem pretty much obliged to produce. I have never liked those charts because so many buyers consider only the handful of anointed “leaders”, even though one...

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Teradata Buys Aprimo for $525 Million: More Marketing Automation Consolidation To Come

Summary: Teradata's acquisition of Aprimo takes the largest remaining independent marketing automation vendor off the market. The market will probably split between enterprise-wide suites and more limited marketing automation systems.Teradata announced today that is acquiring marketing automation vendor Aprimo for a very hefty $525 million – even more than the $480 million that IBM paid for somewhat larger Unica in August.Given the previous Unica deal. other recent marketing system acquisitions, and wide knowledge that Aprimo was eager to...

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Predictions for B2B Marketing in 2011

I don't usually bother with the traditional "predictions for next year" piece at this time of year. But I happened to write one in response to a question at the Focus online community last week. So I figured I'd share it here as well.Summary: 2011 will see continued adjustment as B2B lead generators experiment with the opportunities provided by new media.1. Marketing automation hits an inflection point, or maybe two. Mainstream B2B marketers will purchase marketing automation systems in large numbers, having finally heard about it often enough...

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Case Study: Using a Scenario to Select Business Intelligence Software

Summary: Testing products against a scenario is critical to making a sound selection. But the scenario has to reflect your own requirements. While this post shows results from one test, rankings could be very different for someone else.I’m forever telling people that the only reliable way to select software is to devise scenarios and test the candidate products against them. I recently went through that process for a client and thought I’d share...

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Tableau Software Adds In-Memory Database Engine

Summary: Tableau has added a large-scale in-memory database engine to its data analysis and visualization software. This makes it a lot more powerful. Hard to believe, but it's more than three years since my review of Tableau Software’s data analysis system. Tableau has managed quite well without my attention: sales have doubled every year and should exceed $40 million in 2010; they have 5,500 clients, 60,000 users and 185 employees; and they plan to add 100 more employees next year. Ah, I knew them when.What really matters from a user perspective...

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QlikView's New Release Focuses on Enterprise Deployment

I haven’t written much about QlikView recently, partly because my own work hasn’t required using it and partly because it’s now well enough known that other people cover it in depth. But it remains my personal go-to tool for data analysis and I do keep an eye on it. The company released QlikView 10 in October and Senior Director of Product Marketing Erica Driver briefed me on it in a couple of weeks ago. Here’s what’s up.- Business is good. If you follow the industry at all, you already know that QlikView had a successful initial public stock...

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HubSpot Expands Its Services But Stays Focused on Small Business

Summary: HubSpot has continued to grow its customer base and expand its product. It's looking more like a conventional small-business marketing automation system every day.You have to admire a company that defines a clear strategy and methodically executes it. HubSpot has always aimed to provide small businesses with one easy-to-use system for all their marketing needs. The company began with search engine optimization to attract traffic, and added landing pages, blogging, Web hosting, lead scoring, and Salesforce.com integration. Since my...

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