PvT: Which marketing solution providers are top-of-mind for you? And why? Again, that’s a broad question, but considering some of the challenges that you’ve just mentioned, can you think of solution providers that address customer engagement?

MM: Well, I have the delectable challenge that many of the vendors—technology OEMs, ISVs, marketing service providers, and solution integrators in the DAM, MOM, and related publishing technology markets, are my clients. So I am little biased towards my clients!

Now, that all said, I’m also a category champion: My job is to cheer, lead, and create energy around the next big opportunity; energize and bring new companies into the larger category of DAM, marketing operations, engagement platforms, and open-innovation processes.

That all said, I’m a little bit like a mother with a whole bunch of children. You know, mom loves all of her children. Now she might love one more than the other, but she never says. It’s really important that all of her children feel loved.

PvT: Yep.

MM: Now, so I’m not gonna be namin’ names; however, I can outline some general attributes of the leading vendor or ‘gorilla’. Probably first and foremost is that they have an integration strategy that links explicitly or implicitly to the customer-making process. So they’ve got technologies and capabilities related to pre-sales and post-sales across the customer-making lifecycle. Boom, one.

Two, that they understand that fundamentally the Web does not constitute a channel but a business eco-system. And an eco-system requires a business strategy that anticipates and rewards contributions to the ultimate end-user customer from third and fourth parties. So a business eco-system strategy really comes down to how well you understand the needs of business partners; not just strategic business partners, but perhaps most critically independent consultants and small niche boutique solution providers – 3, 4, or 5 person firms.

The third thing that really distinguishes the real gorilla or market leader is the company that really understands that purchase of its technology represents barely 10 percent of the overall commitment and value that you bring to the customer; that really is about a structured service fulfillment methodology in the spirit of satisfaction assurance. That really is an agreement by and between the vendor and the customer to build or to facilitate the customer developing or building new operational capabilities within the firm.

So that you bought my stuff and make it shelfware is unacceptable. I’m not gonna let myself off the hook until you’ve bought my stuff, you’ve deployed it, you’ve undergone all of the change management and disruption-mitigation processes, and that fundamentally you’ve created new accountabilities around the care and feeding of my technology, and that you’re now using my technology to drive strategic growth. Top line growth, be it with existing customers, or incremental business in new markets with new customers, and that I’m generating sufficient profit to offset the investment that you made in not just my technology but in my service fulfillment methodology.

Those are the 3 hallmarks, if you will, of the vendor who will succeed in this marketplace.

PvT: Fantastic. A very comprehensive answer!

How does the customer benefit?

MM: Cool! Love doing it. You know, I’d like to expand on what we just discussed, emphasizing the levels of good, better, and best—or the simple, moderate and, you know, the Mercedes version—of DAM as business strategy in global marketing operations.

PvT: Okay.

MM: Let me start by saying that enterprise DAM supports a marketing supply-chain strategy for sourcing marketing content as well as an expanding array of services for engaging customers throughout a life cycle.

PvT: Okay.

MM: Next, let’s address how firm innovate new processes within the marketing operations. I put that under the rubric of bottom-up innovation in global marketing operations. This perspective reflects some of our most current work: how companies innovate new processes using small executive peer-workgroups to create 15-day project plans that single person or small group can execute with existing resources and constraints. Specifically, this emphasizes the creation of a master project roadmap for driving innovation into operational capability.

Third, and the one that directly relates to our new white paper on operational capabilities for managing engaging customers for across an entire lifecycle.

So it would be kind of a über roadmap for how all these technologies integrate to a customer-making process model, the various integration points of these various technologies and disciplines, what are the things that you should do now, next, or later, and specifically answering one question over, and over again: How does the customer benefit?

You know, hey, this is a really cool social media technology…uh, how does the customer benefit? Oh, this new analytic tool…oy, how does the customer benefit? Oh, this new web content managr…yes, but how does the customer benefit? Oh, this new email system…how does the customer benefit?

So that’s my mantra, that’s the organizing principle, how does the customer benefit with very specific proposals from the vendor community?

And, of course, that requires that you have an integration mindset, a customer-making process model, and an innovation-services platform by which to accommodate and integrate these new technologies to new or enhanced operational capabilities.

Finally, DAM becomes integral with that innovation-services platform. In fact, digital asset management with its extreme emphasis on process and procedure for ensuring the integrity of metadata, media, and user experience (findability, usability of what you found, and permissions to do what you need to do with what your found) enables a firm to reengineer its processes of creating content and interactive services.

Game changer

MM: SaaS represents another development—almost a second or third wave development of the Web. The idea then is that you don’t have to install software or train a whole IT service management staff for managing and provisioning a service. But you can simply go to a provider such as Oco to get a capability that might’ve cost 5 or 10 million dollars for a hundredth or thousandth of that.

MB: Yes. It really changes the game tremendously. There’s been a lot of argument over, “What really is SaaS?” People have various definitions of it—some broader and some narrower. My definition of it is pretty simple.

SaaS is a service you utilize instead of buying software. It’s defined by what you don’t have to do. You don’t have to buy, learn, modify, install, and maintain software.

MM: I think that the analysts have all kind of gotten together and shared some basic definitions of SaaS V1 or 1.0—which was a point solution that wasn’t really set up to interoperate. It might pass data, but it wasn’t really set up to interoperate with other SaaS applications or installed on-premise applications.

MB: I think people talk about the SaaS 1.0 versus the future of SaaS. It’s true that the first wave of SaaS introduced applications like Salesforce.com. Some people would even put applications like Webex into that category. I don’t. The alternative to using Webex is not buying a software package. The alternative to using Webex is getting on an airplane to go give a customer presentation.

MM: I think the Go To Meeting Citrix people would probably argue with that, but that’s okay.

MB: I mean the alternative to these online demo and meeting systems — Webex or the other services like it—is if you don’t want to use one of those, you can’t buy a package that solves the bridging problem between you and whomever you need to give a demo to. I suppose you could host such a thing on your own corporate website, but I don’t recall many people doing that in the days before Webex.

In any case, the point is that these applications didn’t involve integration. We have moved into an era you can call SaaS 2.0, if you want, where the applications are starting to involve the core activities or functions that businesses do, such as business intelligence or ERP and so forth.

So yes, there certainly is a qualitative shift, there. But some of the industry people who I have some disagreement with would say, “It’s not SaaS if you can’t download it yourself,” or, “It’s not SaaS if it doesn’t have self-installation and free trial.”

They basically are narrowing the definition in ways that I don’t believe are required. As far as I’m concerned, if an alternative to a solution requires that you have to buy software and install and maintain it, then it fits the category of SaaS.

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Webification of BI

MM: Then in history of business intelligence, the Web came along—and some things began to change. Could you quickly reprise us in terms of what changed how as a function of the Web, in the space of business intelligence?

MB: The Web changes everything. The Web changes some things directly and some things indirectly. One of the interesting forces in the database world and the data processing world is that the Web introduced a whole new realm of data to be handled.

The whole world of e-commerce introduced a need to understand e-commerce marketing, and to understand click-streams and how people were using the Internet and so forth. That created a number of new opportunities for people to try to process and understand the wealth of data, and to understand the customer behavior.

The companies that successfully handled Internet advertising have become the masters of this—Google and so forth. That’s the way that the Internet raised the stakes on this kind of marketing.

There’s also the absolutely direct benefit that the Web introduced—a new way to get information to people—in a way that is really much more appealing.

You’re able to get rid of many of the hassles and costs associated with software installation, if you can just give people a website to visit to get the information they’re looking for. People really like this model. It has all of the graphical capabilities that they’ve become accustomed to with their Office and installed desktop software.

That is an immediate thing that people latch on to: “Can’t I just have this on a web page, please?” Of course there is no reason that they can’t. There are a lot of companies like Oco making that happen now.

The Web also changes the way that the service, the calculations, and the data preparation can all be handled. Now, and throughout the history of data warehousing—going back to the mid-’90s, there was an awful lot of outsourced data warehousing. Lots of companies outsourced their data warehousing to big companies like Acxiom that specialized in data warehouse hosting, particularly for target marketing and related applications.

The Internet basically makes this idea a lot more attractive to companies—and in particular, attractive to companies with smaller budgets. It’s not just the big companies that can consider leveraging database and business intelligence technology, but in fact, everybody now can.

People are reluctant in some cases, because they fear, “Oh, gee, my precious data is going outside of my firewall.” But once people are satisfied that their data’s going to be handled securely, there are tremendous advantages.

One data-warehousing consultant I know said it pretty well, “All companies outsource the way their money is handled. That’s certainly precious to them. Why not data?”

MM: I think it’s because there’s a career track associated with it.

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