I spent the early part of this week at SAS’s annual analysts conference, where the company reviewed the past year and presented its vision for 2012. The story this year was simple: “big data”, and SAS’s “high performance analytics” approach to taming it. Of course, “high performance analytics” is what SAS has always done and, like “big data” itself, the term is relative. What SAS specifically presented was a re-engineering of its core analytical procedures to run in “shared nothing” multi-processor environments. Each data set is split...
Wednesday, 29 February 2012
Sunday, 26 February 2012
One of first marketing automation systems I ever saw – this would be during the Reagan Presidency – was a custom-built dial-up network to distribute collateral to farm equipment dealers. This and similar seeds have since sprouted into a forest of products that help brand marketers work with dealers, distributors, franchisees, and agents. Some of these channel marketing systems focus on lead distribution, some on locally-customizable promotion materials,...
Tuesday, 21 February 2012
These are exciting times in the world of analytical systems. The Web has created new demands to handle unprecedented data volumes and semi-structured data. Cloud-based deployment offers near-infinite hardware scalability and flexibility. Acquisitions by enterprise software giants have opened opportunities for smaller, more nimble alternatives. The result has been an explosion of companies using new techniques for managing and analyzing huge data volumes. Many, including Vertica, Aster Data, Greenplum, and Netezza, have also been assimilated...
Thursday, 16 February 2012
Thursday, 9 February 2012
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.New-ish marketing automation vendor NurtureHQ showed me its product recently. It’s really nice. Clean interface, easy to use, all the standard marketing automation features. Particular strengths in:• split testing (separately for email subject lines and versions) • lead scoring (automatically reduces scores from older events) • CRM integration (Highrise, Capsule CRM, Sugar CRM, Salesforce.com, and an open API)• marketing analysis (users can track multiple outcomes per campaign) • content management (nice...
Tuesday, 7 February 2012
My last post looked at data from our just-released B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Tool (VEST) to understand general industry trends and identify the greatest areas of improvement. Today we’ll look at the VEST data to see what’s still hard to find. As before, the charts show three columns: change in feature availability over the past year among core marketing automation vendors; current availability among core vendors; and current availability...
Sunday, 5 February 2012
Last week's post took a horse race approach to data from our newly available B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Tool (VEST): who’s ahead, who’s behind, and who is coming on strong. But that’s more important to industry insiders than the marketers who actually use these systems. Real marketers care about what the systems can do.The VEST survey, covering nearly 200 items per vendor, answers that question in glorious detail. You need...
Wednesday, 1 February 2012
I released the 2012 edition of our B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Tool (VEST) report today, an event that deserves more hoopla that I’ve given it. The VEST provides by far the most detailed, objective information available on industry vendors. It includes nearly 200 data points on 21 products, thumbnail sketches of each vendor’s strengths and weaknesses, and three industry quadrants showing leaders in different market segments. It’s...
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