O to 90 in Four Easy Steps: A Marketing Maturity Model

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®

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O to 90 in Four Easy Steps:

A Marketing Maturity Model

“Aprimo has developed a Marketing Operations Maturity Model that will help shed a

light on the path that lies in front of organizations that have made a choice to elevate

their ability for marketing to deliver value.”

– Michael Emerson, Aprimo CMO

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issue is anchored by the Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Marketing Management, 2Q08 note (see enclosed note on

page 4). With each writing, we affirm our leadership to steadfastly deliver technology and services that define

enter-prise marketing.

In 1998, we set out with a compelling vision and a willingness to take the “road not taken” by the rest of the marketing

technology vendor community. This vision was focused on the notion that a single marketing platform would provide

the primary path for all of the activities that connect centralized and distributed marketing teams, a marketing supply

chain and the customers that they serve. Both then and now, we called this integrated framework the “Digital Marketing

Value Chain,” that aligns with an entire product category called Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM).

As companies begin to invest in EMM, they look for a roadmap that tells them where they are compared with other

marketing organizations in the world that are considering or have begun such a journey. Using customer feedback,

Aprimo developed a Marketing Operations Maturity Model (MOMM) that is based on the same framework used by the

ISO 9000 standards group. This model describes the native state of marketing, the Ad Hoc Level, and progresses

through to the highest level of attainment, the Optimized Level. Our Aprimo white paper describes each of the four

lev-els of marketing maturity and defines a set of milestones that organizations should look at to advance to the next level.

This quarter also marks a very major milestone in the life of Aprimo – our 10th anniversary. We remain grateful to those

early customers who put their trust in us as an emerging company that understood the pain and opportunity of

market-ing inefficiencies. In 2008, we continue on what has been our quest for the past decade, to help our customers put

together a comprehensive technology roadmap that looks to eliminate a hodgepodge of point solutions and begin to

build a true marketing technology vision.

I invite you to read this research note, the white paper on marketing maturity and our case study about how E.ON

implemented Aprimo solutions to measure marketing effectiveness and connect campaign management with a

com-prehensive platform for marketing.

Michael Emerson

Chief Marketing Officer

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Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Marketing

Management

No leaders or challengers have emerged in the enterprise marketing management market, which remains in infancy. Aprimo, Oracle (Siebel), SAP, SAS and Unica are visionar-ies; the other vendors are niche players. Carefully assess your marketing requirements against vendor capabilities and EMM vision.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

Enterprise marketing management (EMM) is a platform for the entire marketing department, including all roles, functions and processes. However, few vendors offer the breadth of function-ality to meet all marketing roles and processes. Most vendors have relatively good campaign management capabilities, as basic campaign management becomes increasingly commodi-tized. Marketing resource management (MRM) investments tend to be more diverse, making it more of a differentiator for enterprises that select MRM capabilities as part of an EMM platform.

There also are major differences in many of the other capabili-ties offered, such as lead management, event management, loyalty management, marketing performance management and industry-specific capabilities. Carefully assess the underlying architecture, including platform, database, content/knowledge repository, workflow, business rules and Web services to sup-port openness, integrability, configurability, scalability and flexi-bility. Users must assess carefully a vendor’s capabilities, as well as its vision and product road map, against their short – and long-term requirements for marketing automation. Expect to make trade-offs regarding functionality, architecture and usability.

MAGIC QUADRANT

Market Overview

The EMM market remains immature in vendor offerings and user adoption. Traditionally, most organizations have selected marketing applications based on tactical requirements, such as campaign management, MRM, e-marketing and analytics. We see emerging interest in creating a platform for EMM that sup-ports integrated marketing processes across a variety of mar-keting roles and functions.

For organizations that already have invested significantly in a variety of marketing technologies, particularly in business-to-consumer (B2C) industries (such as financial services, retail and telecom), this may involve first consolidating and integrating applications. Enterprises that have not automated their marketing functions tend to begin the process of evaluation from a broader vision and expect a larger set of capabilities from one vendor, including a service-oriented platform with highly configurable, role-based applications. These typically include business-to-busi-ness or busibusiness-to-busi-ness-to-B2C industries, such as high tech, consumer packaged goods (CPG) and other manufacturing.

However, these deployments likely will take three to five years to completely roll out across marketing. Few organizations have implemented a primary EMM platform of integrated marketing functionality. Gartner estimates that fewer than 200 companies have integrated their campaign management and MRM applica-tions across database marketing, creative marketing and corpo-rate marketing functions.

Only eight vendors qualify for the EMM Magic Quadrant. Most of these vendors offer modular suites of marketing applications that support a variety of marketing roles and functions, such as campaign management, MRM, customer data mining, e-mar-keting, lead management, event management and loyalty man-agement. No vendor offers a complete set of functionality for all marketing roles; however, several vendors are developing and acquiring capabilities across different marketing functions. Of critical importance in EMM is the shift from a set of integrated modules built on a common architecture to highly configurable (based on role) functionality components offered as services on an open service-oriented architecture (SOA) with a marketing data model and analytical toolset for measuring marketing per-formance. Assessing a vendor’s vision for this architectural shift to support role-based application delivery is an important crite-rion for selecting a primary vendor to supply an EMM platform.

challengers leaders

niche players visionaries

completeness of vision ability to execute As of June 2008 Unica Aprimo SAS Oracle (Siebel) SAP Infor Alterian Teradata Oracle PeopleSoft Oracle E-Business Suite

Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Marketing Management

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In addition, vendors must demonstrate a vision for EMM that includes:

1. A broad focus on capabilities that cross the marketing function

2. Role-based delivery of functionality, information and content

3. Flexibility and usability of applications by marketing users

4. SOAs

5. Marketing performance management

Added

Given the increased focus on MRM by Infor (through in-house development) and Teradata (through its partnership with Assetlink), we added the two vendors back to the Magic Quadrant in 2008.

Dropped

No vendors were dropped.

Evaluation Criteria

Ability to Execute

The criteria remain the same for 2008 as they were in 2007. Product/Service (High): Because the EMM market is immature, the breadth and depth of product capabilities and product archi-tecture are key differentiators in vendor capabilities and are among the most important criteria for selecting a vendor. Subcriteria include:

• Campaign management (30%)

• MRM (25%)

• Other marketing solutions/capabilities, such as lead agement, loyalty management and event/trade show man-agement (15%)

• Marketing performance management (5%)

• Architecture flexibility or workflow (10%)

• Application usability or interface design and role-based access (10%)

• SOA and composite application functionality (5%)

Overall Viability (Standard): Viability is an important criterion for investing in a strategic vendor to support your enterprise mar-keting platform. Subcriteria include overall financials (50%), marketing-related revenue (30%) and sales, marketing and partner strategies (20%).

We expect market consolidation to continue among MRM and campaign management vendors, as well as more entrants into this space among other players in the MRM and campaign man-agement Magic Quadrants.

Market Definition/Description

EMM encompasses the business strategies, process automation and technologies required to effectively operate a marketing department, align resources, execute customer-centric strategies and improve marketing performance. EMM is best-suited for large organizations with 50 or more people in marketing. This includes functionality for campaign management, lead management, MRM and analytics. However, EMM is more than simply the sum of “parts” (such as campaign management plus MRM). EMM also emphasizes the architecture and platform for role-based distribu-tion of informadistribu-tion, content, funcdistribu-tionality, data and analysis for per-formance management. Critical elements of this platform include SOA, composite application functionality, a data repository for structured and nonstructured data, marketing data models and analytical toolsets.

Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

The criteria for this year’s Magic Quadrant remain the same as for 2007. To be included in the 2008 EMM Magic Quadrant, a vendor must demonstrate the following attributes and capabili-ties.

•

Market traction and momentum

• The vendor has at least 25 production customers for mar-keting functionality (for example, campaign management and MRM).

• The vendor has at least 15 new customers for market-ing applications (for example, campaign management and MRM) during the past rolling four quarters.

Revenue criteria are driven by the MRM and multichannel cam-paign management Magic Quadrants.

•

EMM product capabilities:

• Vendors must meet the minimum criteria for inclusion in the campaign management and MRM Magic Quadrants, or the vendors must be on the campaign management Magic Quadrant and in the process of releasing a generally available MRM solution, or on the campaign management Magic Quadrant and develop-ing a strong technology partnership with an MRM ven-dor to deliver a preintegrated EMM solution.

• Vendors must offer capabilities that support the opera-tional (workflow, business rules, tasks and project management) and analytical (reporting, analysis, pre-dictive modeling and optimization) aspects of EMM.

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Sales Execution/Pricing (Low): Although this criterion is less important than product capabilities and the overall viability of the vendor, organizations should consider the ability to pur-chase marketing capabilities/functionality incrementally to sup-port key processes and look for flexible pricing options. This cri-terion receives a low weighting.

Market Responsiveness and Track Record (High): A key evalu-ation criterion is how responsive the market is to a vendor and its solution, as well as the customer’s experience working with the solution in the customer’s geography and industry. This cri-terion provides validation points for the vendor’s solution. Vendor experience in the market, particularly an emerging mar-ket, often is key to a company’s success.

Marketing Execution: This is subsumed under the Market Responsiveness and Track Record criterion.

Customer Experience: This is subsumed under the Market Responsiveness and Track Record criterion.

Operations (Standard): Implementation and support are rele-vant considerations during vendor evaluations and can affect an organization’s successful implementation. Professional service experience is key to faster implementation. Access to knowl-edgeable support staff can increase the appropriate ongoing use of the solution. Subcriteria include customer service and support (50%) and professional services (50%).

Completeness of Vision

Market Understanding (High): Marketing vision and innovation is an important criterion for EMM because this is an immature market. A vendor’s understanding of the EMM market and its specific value proposition for different sets of marketing users, including the chief marketing officer and senior marketing exec-utives, is critical to selecting a vendor with the vision to meet the user requirements of the marketing function. This criterion has the second-highest weight, behind offering (product) strategy. Marketing Strategy: This is subsumed under the Business Model criterion.

Sales Strategy: This is subsumed under the Business Model criterion.

Offering (Product) Strategy (High): Innovation and vision across the breadth and depth of EMM capabilities and architectures are critical to continuing to meet the needs of a maturing market and to establishing a platform that all marketing users (roles and functions) can employ. Subcriteria include:

• The vendor’s vision for campaign management (20%)

• MRM (30%)

• Vision for other capabilities, such as lead management, loyalty management and event/trade show management (15%)

• Marketing performance management (10%)

• Architecture flexibility or workflow (10%)

• Application usability or interface design and role-based access (5%)

• SOA and composite application functionality (10%) Business Model (Standard): The business model for how a ven-dor aligns marketing and sales strategies for particular indus-tries and geographies to deliver on its EMM value proposition is an important component of its vision, although less so than mar-ket understanding and product capabilities. Marmar-ket understand-ing is key to developunderstand-ing the right solutions, while the business model provides vendors with the ability to execute on effective-ly selling these solutions. This criterion receives a standard weighting.

Vertical/Industry Strategy:This is subsumed under the Business Model criterion.

Innovation: This is subsumed under the Offering (Product) Strategy criterion.

Geographic Strategy: This is subsumed under the Business Model criterion.

Table 1. Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria Weighting high standard low high no rating no rating standard Evaluation Criteria Product/Service

Overall Viability (Business Unit, Financial, Strategy, Organization)

Sales Execution/Pricing

Market Responsiveness and Track Record Marketing Execution

Customer Experience Operations

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Leaders

Leaders in the EMM market have clients that have adopted their solutions as the primary vendor and platform to support all mar-keting roles and functions. These vendors deliver breadth and depth of integrated marketing functionality on large, enter-prisewide and global platforms that extend across the marketing organization, providing the role-based delivery of information, content and functionality to all marketing roles and functions that support all marketing processes. Leaders successfully articulate business propositions that resonate with marketing buyers. Because of the immaturity of users and vendor offerings in the market, there are no leaders in this market.

Challengers

Challengers in the EMM market primarily provide marketing offerings that complement other business applications. These vendors typically offer breadth of functionality on an integrated platform, although often at the expense of depth. The focus is typically on IT buyers, rather than on business users. Challengers may have a diminished understanding of market trends, marketing buyers and particular marketing processes and roles. They may not be able to effectively articulate their vision or may not have mobilized their resources to excel in the market segment. There are no challengers in the EMM market.

Visionaries

Visionaries have a strong vision for applying technology and developing a platform to support a wide variety of marketing roles, functions and processes. They tend to have a broad focus on marketing functionality. Although they may have core compe-tencies in certain areas, they may lack depth in others. They are

distinguished in the openness, usability and flexibility of their application architectures and vision for component-based, high-ly configurable marketing applications. A visionary vendor is a market thought leader and innovator for creating a platform for the entire marketing department that has not yet gained broad market penetration and adoption as the primary marketing plat-form for its visionary capabilities on EMM.

Niche Players

Niche players perform well in a small segment of the EMM mar-ket and may be focused on a specific set of marmar-keting function-ality, roles and processes. Niche vendors are likely to lack breadth of marketing functionality across marketing roles and to have gaps in broader EMM functionality and platform require-ments. They may have depth in particular role and process areas. Niche vendors may have a limited vision for the broader marketing function and all the roles within that division; howev-er, they may have a good understanding of a few specific mar-keting roles/functions.

Vendor Strengths and Cautions

Alterian

Strengths

• Breadth of functionality in core areas: Alterian offers breadth of marketing capabilities across campaign man-agement, MRM and e-mail marketing. It provides data inte-gration and an analytical foundation for database market-ing. Alterian has improved its marketing platform with the release of v.4.0 of its engine, which offers faster load times, distributed processing and multitenancy capabilities to improve overall scalability. It has added mobile marketing capabilities with its Sybase 365 partnership.

• Strong reseller partnerships: Alterian has more than 80 global reseller partnerships, including many of the largest marketing service providers (MSPs) in the U.S. and Europe, with a large installed base of hosted database marketing solutions via MSPs. Alterian also works with many of the largest services organizations in South America, India and Australia. In addition to hosting solu-tions, these resellers support on-premises deployments. • Strong growth: Alterian has grown more than 38%

annual-ly during the past two years. More than 50% of its revenue came from the U.S. market in 2007. Its recommended offer to acquire Mediasurface would add Web content manage-ment capabilities, 70% more revenue, 170 employees and 450 clients.

• Consider Alterian as a midmarket alternative if your com-pany cannot afford on-premises marketing applications. Table 2. Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria

Weighting high no rating no rating high standard no rating no rating no rating Evaluation Criteria Market Understanding Marketing Strategy Sales Strategy

Offering (Product) Strategy Business Model

Vertical/Industry Strategy Innovation

Geographic Strategy

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Cautions

• No prepackaged lead or event management solutions:

Alterian does not provide prepackaged capabilities outside of database marketing and MRM, such as event manage-ment or lead managemanage-ment.

• Limited analytics for nonpower users: Analytics is built for power users. However, Alterian is working on dashboards that will bring data and insights to nonpower users that employ visualization technology.

• Slow adoption of MRM: Adoption of Alterian’s MRM solu-tions remains slower than its campaign management capa-bilities, with limited experience in MRM from the hosting MSPs. Few references have integrated campaign manage-ment and MRM in a hosted model.

• Overreliance on MSPs: There continues to be a heavy

reliance on MSPs for ongoing viability with a revenue model that favors the MSPs. However, Alterian’s viability is improving with its strong revenue growth. It continues to expand its partner network while continuing to grow its rev-enue to offset its traditional reliance on partners.

Aprimo

Strengths

• Breadth and depth of marketing functionality and platform: Aprimo’s role-based vision for EMM demonstrates an understanding of the entire marketing function, its value chain and its ecosystem. Aprimo offers a breadth of mar-keting capabilities across MRM, campaign management, lead management and event management. Its depth in MRM capabilities is driving strong market momentum for Aprimo in multiple industries as the MRM market matures. The financial-management component of its MRM solution often is a linchpin for clients pursuing a suite of marketing applications. Its open, SOA architecture, which is based on .NET and has a library of more than 700 Aprimo objects, can be used for role-based and process configuration. All applications and modules use one code base, making components reusable across a common platform.

• Continued growth and sales momentum: Although

Aprimo’s new pricing model makes it difficult to compare revenue growth from 2006 to 2007, the vendor continues to increase its bookings 30% year over year for its marketing applications. This growth is organic and does not come from acquisitions. Despite a softening economy, Aprimo is projecting 25% to 30% bookings growth in 2008 and 2009. Most bookings continue to be in its core area of MRM, but there is an increasing number of bookings for campaign

management and lead management. It also has several large agency deals in progress. Aprimo is seeing increas-ing sales momentum with its partners, includincreas-ing system integrators (Accenture, BearingPoint, Hitachi Consulting and IBM), MSPs and agencies.

• Strong R&D investment: Plans for the release of v.8.5 in fourth-quarter 2008 include improvements in MRM (improvements to workflow, Adobe annotations, print-on-demand capabilities, dynamic printing and collateral cus-tomization), campaign management (a digital marketing release that includes improved e-mail capabilities, the abil-ity to build microsites, Web analytics integration and a Web tracking solution) and marketing performance management (integrated campaign analytics to view customer segments as a universe and report on the segment). Version 9.0, to be released in third-quarter 2009, includes plans for fully distributed campaign management capabilities, scenario evaluation analytics and marketing mix modeling.

• Developing partner ecosystem: Aprimo is developing its partner ecosystem, which includes vendors that provide print-on-demand (Kodak), sales force automation (sales-force.com and Microsoft), predictive analytics (SPSS), con-tent management (EMC), marketing asset management (Xinet), Web analytics (WebTrends) and call center (eglue). • Delivery model choice: Aprimo offers multiple deployment and pricing options, including premises, hosted and on-demand models.

• Consider Aprimo for its strong MRM capabilities and as an integrated platform for EMM.

Cautions

• Depth in campaign management: Advanced campaign man-agement and e-marketing capabilities, particularly for B2C organizations, still lag behind other leading campaign man-agement vendors. However, Aprimo continues to close this gap, and many clients state that the capabilities meet their requirements.

• Lack of advanced analytics: Aprimo lacks a strong set of advanced analytical solutions. Companies may need to augment their analytical solutions with other vendors’ offer-ings or via Aprimo’s partnerships with companies such as SPSS.

• Lack of industry solutions: Despite specific capabilities to support many industries (CPG/retail, financial services, life sciences/pharmaceuticals, automotive, agencies, media/entertainment and technical/manufacturing), Aprimo’s offering lacks prepackaged solutions for specific industries outside its solution for agencies.

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• Growth pressures: With its continued strong growth, Aprimo must balance company growth with software sales. Some clients have expressed concern that account management and customer support could become overextended quickly as Aprimo continues its rapid growth. Furthermore, Aprimo must continue expanding its partner network for implemen-tation services so that it does not experience a postsales implementation backlog. Aprimo had more than 100 consult-ants certified through partners in 2007. It has 40 scheduled for certification in 2008 and projects that there will be more than 200 total certified via partners by year end. It also has four new certified service partners already in 2008.

• Market conditions for initial public offering (IPO): Aprimo withdrew its S1 for IPO on 3 April 2008 due to conditions in the financial markets and concerns over company valuation. Gartner expects the new pricing model to pose some issues and extra challenges in the near term. Clients should expect that if market conditions improve, then Aprimo will file for IPO again in a year or two.

• Availability of local skills: Although overall Aprimo Global Services (AGS) is well-respected for its marketing knowl-edge and expertise, clients have cited issues with the num-ber and expertise level of local skills (implementation and services) in regions outside North America and the U.K. Clients in regions outside these areas should evaluate care-fully local AGS resources and should consider alternative implementation partners.

Infor

Strengths

• Broadening vision for marketing: Infor’s vision for EMM is broadening, and its marketing suite is expanding with the recent development and general availability of its new MRM solution. Infor provides campaign management, MRM, ana-lytics and lead management capabilities for marketing organizations. Infor’s vision is to leverage MRM as an entry point and to leverage the unified user interface into the dif-ferent types of marketing (outbound, inbound and event trig-gered) and to use these types of marketing, in addition to sales and customer service, as channels of execution. • Robust campaign management: The strength of Infor’s

prod-uct lies in its campaign management, particularly its inbound marketing capabilities. It also recently expanded its event-triggered marketing capabilities within its campaign man-agement suite.

• Strong architecture: Infor leverages SOA-based technology and architecture from Epiphany (which Infor acquired) to form the foundation of its marketing solutions. The platform

is Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) and uses Web services standards, providing an open, scalable architecture for integrating solutions and avoiding ven-dor lock-in.

• Large customer base: Infor has the ability to leverage its broad customer base to cross-sell marketing applica-tions, particularly MRM and lead management into B2B accounts.

Cautions

• Unproven MRM: MRM capabilities are new and not yet proved in the market. Initial benefits likely will be tied to those that augment campaign management (inbound and outbound) rather than to the corporate or creative areas of marketing.

• Lack of a prepackaged marketing performance manage-ment solution: Although Infor provides a set of analytical tools and performance management capabilities, it does not yet provide a holistic, prepackaged marketing per-formance management solution. This likely will come with its second wave of releases for role-based homepages in the form of a dashboard and key performance indicators (KPIs) for the chief marketing officer and perhaps other key marketing personnel.

• No software-as-a-service (SaaS) option: Although Infor provides hosting and an application service provider option for many of its applications, including inbound marketing, it has not yet made MRM, outbound market-ing or lead management capabilities available in these alternative delivery models. Depending on the adoption of its Business Edition solution, Infor may develop these capabilities in the future.

• No process-driven lead management solution: Lead

management capabilities rely largely on data integration between marketing and sales applications, with qualifi-cation done during the sales process. A more marketing-centric solution based on business process integration with business rules, flowcharts and workflow capabilities would enable marketing staff to better qualify leads before sending them to sales.

• Debt levels may limit strategic flexibility: Infor has good financial flexibility; however, it carries a proportionately higher level of debt ($4.5 billion), as compared with some of its competitors (for example, Oracle and SAP). Gartner believes that, in this financial market, the debt level may limit Infor’s strategic flexibility, as compared with other major vendors.

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Oracle (Siebel)

Strengths

• Vision on loyalty is driving growth: Oracle’s vision for Siebel EMM centers on loyalty as a driver, not just for marketing but also for cross-CRM processes that span sales and cus-tomer service. This positions marketing applications as being core to the CRM suite. Gartner estimates that Siebel Marketing applications comprise more than 50% of on-premises Siebel CRM deals. While campaign management (including e-mail and Real-Time Decision) continue to comprise the bulk of marketing application revenue, loyal-ty marketing is the fastest growing area for Siebel, with MRM coming in third.

• Breadth of functionality: Oracle Siebel Marketing continues to have one of the broadest sets of capabilities for EMM, including campaign management, MRM, loyalty manage-ment, lead managemanage-ment, event managemanage-ment, price man-agement, privacy management and several industry-specif-ic capabilities, such as trade promotion management, mar-ket funds development and financial profitability analysis for banking.

• Growing partner ecosystem: Oracle continues to develop a strong partner ecosystem for Siebel Marketing. Oracle has 75 external and 60 Oracle employees trained on consult-ing, support and sales in Asia, Europe and the Americas. Oracle also has signed several agencies for go-to-market, reseller and best-practice opportunities, including Sapient, JJ, Experian and MarketOne in the U.K. Service providers that can host the solution include Accenture, Acxiom, Allant, IBM, TCS, Wipro Technologies and Deloitte. • Focused R&D investment: The major focus of the Siebel

CRM v.8.1 for 2008 is on loyalty management, including an enhanced real-time loyalty engine, partner validation capa-bilities, dynamic redemption prices, an in-store loyalty engine, corporate employee joint rewards and prebuilt loy-alty task-based user interface processes. Oracle Siebel takes a very industry-specific view of loyalty, developing capabilities for the airline, retail, telecom, financial services and other travel and hospitality industries. Version 8.1 also will provide enhancements for campaign management including list and response import, e-mail marketing, Web marketing and the release of Real-Time Decision 3.0 (Sigma Dynamics). Lead management capabilities are being enhanced in 8.1 to become more process oriented, including lead and response capture, advanced rules for lead scoring and routing and templates for end-to-end lead processes. For MRM, the 8.1 release will provide integra-tion with Oracle’s Universal Content Management soluintegra-tion

for content management, creative content development and field fulfillment.

• Oracle’s go-to-market solution: Siebel Marketing is the pri-mary go-to-market product for marketing in Oracle (for example, Oracle and PeopleSoft Marketing are targeted only to E-Business Suite [EBS] and PeopleSoft cus-tomers). Gartner continues to see interest in the Siebel installed base (such as sales force automation and contact center) for adding its marketing solutions.

• Consider Siebel for its breadth of marketing capabilities, integration into the broader CRM suite and vision for EMM based on loyalty.

Cautions

• Lack of depth in MRM: Oracle Siebel’s depth of capabilities in MRM (for example, workflow for production manage-ment, detailed financial management and marketing fulfill-ment beyond partner relationship managefulfill-ment) continues to lag best-of-breed MRM vendors. The product has not yet completed its integration cycle with Oracle’s Universal Content Management solution, and it is still unknown how much this will improve its MRM capabilities in the areas of creative production management and marketing fulfillment.

• Unclear investment in marketing performance

manage-ment: Although Oracle has a strong focus on analytics with robust marketing analytics in several areas, it has not invested as much in specific prepackaged marketing ana-lytics and dashboards for more-casual business users dur-ing the past year. Oracle has made significant investments in its core business intelligence platform but not into a set of specific marketing performance management capabili-ties. Future plans call for additional prebuilt marketing ana-lytic applications for loyalty and broader marketing perform-ance by the end of 2008 or early 2009. For advperform-anced ana-lytical capabilities for data mining, Oracle has partners in areas of data mining – for example, SPSS. Customers should look for proof points of established integration with these partners.

• Weak process-driven lead management: Although lead

management processes have been improved in v.8.1, con-tinued improvements are needed in business rules and workflow to improve the flexibility and configurability by business process owners to improve process flow in MRM. • No strong SaaS option: Oracle has not articulated a clear strategy for the placement of its Siebel Marketing applica-tion, on-demand multitenancy model but relies instead on hosting via Oracle On Demand and on service partners.

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• Lack of clarity on the impact of Fusion: There is the poten-tial of migration to Fusion in the future, if and when Oracle shifts investments from Siebel Marketing to Fusion applica-tions. Continue to monitor Oracle’s plans for Fusion and its migration plans and development of Siebel Marketing beyond v.8.x.

• Few stand-alone marketing deals: Investment in an inte-grated CRM suite continues to drive most Siebel Marketing deals. Market and brand perceptions around Siebel CRM as more of a CRM suite than a stand-alone marketing suite limit the number of stand-alone marketing deals for which Siebel CRM is considered. However, marketing users select Siebel Marketing for its capabilities in this area, and Gartner has seen more competitive wins against vendors such as SAP and Unica.

Oracle E-Business Suite

Strengths

• Breadth of functionality: Oracle EBS offers a breadth of capabilities across marketing, such as campaign manage-ment, MRM, lead managemanage-ment, event managemanage-ment, trade promotion management and marketing performance man-agement. With the release of 12.0, usability is improved. However, Gartner has not seen a strong demand or uptake in v.12.0 for marketing.

• Integration into EBS: Integration to data and information outside marketing as part of a broader EBS is provided – the platform is based on Oracle Customer Data Hub, data models from other solutions and content management application.

• Potential to leverage Oracle Application Integration Architecture (AIA): EBS has the potential to provide good integration to other Oracle products via the AIA, for exam-ple, Oracle Universal Content Management, with Siebel Marketing. However, no integrations have been developed yet for marketing applications.

• Targeted at established EBS back-office customers: The installed base of EBS predominately comprises B2B high-tech and manufacturing organizations.

• Consider Oracle Marketing if you are an EBS customer and have other Oracle CRM (EBS) deployments you are inte-grating with marketing. Ensure that this version meets your short – and long-term requirements.

Cautions

• Lack of depth: Depth of marketing functionality lags behind the best-of-breed marketing vendors. Usability, although improved, also still lags behind best-of-breed marketing vendors – its EBS application was built from a set of core technologies (content management, business intelligence and workflow), and clients often cite usability of the inter-face as an issue with deployment and user adoption based on this assembly.

• Uncertain R&D investments: Siebel Marketing is the pri-mary go-to-market marketing product for Oracle. Under Applications Unlimited, we expect to see some new invest-ments in functionality in EBS, driven by the established client/industry focus. However, we expect investments in marketing applications to be minor, as compared with other application areas. Clients should compare road maps between EBS, Siebel and Fusion marketing applications, as well as the planned integrations between them. • No SaaS option: Oracle EBS for marketing is not available

in an on-demand, multitenancy model but relies instead on hosting via Oracle On Demand or on its service partners. • EBS customers should consider Oracle EBS for marketing

if the established version meets short-term requirements and where needed future functionality is defined clearly in the road map of future releases. If you are not an EBS cus-tomer, then consider alternatives, including Siebel Marketing.

Oracle PeopleSoft

Strengths

• Breadth of functionality: Oracle PeopleSoft offers a breadth of capabilities across campaign management, e-mail mar-keting and MRM.

• The potential to leverage AIA: Oracle PeopleSoft has the potential to leverage Oracle AIA for better integration with other Oracle products (for example, PeopleSoft e-mail marketing with Siebel Marketing). However, no integrations have been developed yet for marketing applications. • Option for nonprofit industries: The product is targeted at

PeopleSoft application users, particularly those in govern-ment, higher education and other nonprofit organizations. The offering is a more affordable option for nonprofit indus-tries than some of the more expensive solutions on the market.

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• Consider PeopleSoft Marketing if you are a PeopleSoft application customer looking for integration with other PeopleSoft applications and plan to leverage the same infrastructure for all PeopleSoft applications. Nonprofit organizations concerned about IT costs might consider PeopleSoft Marketing as a less-expensive alternative but must evaluate the solution carefully to ensure that the functionality meets their requirements.

Cautions

• Lack of depth: Depth of marketing functionality for MRM and campaign management trails best-of-breed vendors. • Uncertain R&D investments: Siebel Marketing is the

pri-mary go-to-market marketing product for Oracle. Under Applications Unlimited, we expect to see some new invest-ments in functionality in PeopleSoft applications, driven by Oracle’s client/industry focus. However, we expect invest-ments in marketing applications to be minor, as compared with other application areas. Clients should compare road maps between PeopleSoft, Siebel and Fusion marketing applications, as well as planned integrations between them.

• No SaaS option: Oracle PeopleSoft Enterprise Marketing is not available in an on-demand, multitenancy model but relies instead on hosting via Oracle On Demand or its service partners.

• PeopleSoft customers should consider Oracle PeopleSoft only if the version meets users’ short-term requirements and where needed future functionality is defined clearly in the road map of future releases. If you are not a PeopleSoft application user, then consider alternatives, including Siebel Marketing.

SAP

Strengths

• Breadth of functionality: SAP has a broad range of capabil-ities for marketing organizations, including campaign man-agement, segmentation, MRM, lead manman-agement, market-ing analytics and partner channel management. SAP also provides industry-specific marketing capabilities, particu-larly for CPG, retail and high technology, such as trade pro-motion management, market funds development, coupon management, product development management and channel partner marketing. Gartner has noted increasing interest from SAP clients with the SAP CRM 2007 release, but most of these new projects are still in the implementa-tion stage.

• Stronger vision with new leadership: With new CRM and marketing leadership, SAP’s vision for its marketing appli-cations is improving significantly. SAP’s “coinnovation” strategy focuses on customers, partners and SAP to devel-op new marketing capabilities. Part of the vision is ensuring that the marketing applications can work as stand-alone applications, outside the rest of SAP CRM and ERP appli-cations. Feedback from clients and prospects on the SAP CRM 2007 release is that usability has improved dramati-cally from prior versions; although it still may not match best-of-breed marketing vendors for overall usability. • R&D on new solution areas: The coinnovation strategy is

driving the development of a new Loyalty Management solution (membership and card management, partner inte-gration and points management) and distributed marketing capabilities with a dealer campaign management solution. It also is enhancing capabilities for advanced campaign management for B2C clients (for example, segmentation, external list management and campaign execution) and MRM (calendar, user guidance and digital asset manage-ment [DAM]).

• Use of Web 2.0: SAP is beginning to use more Web 2.0 capabilities for building communities and collaboration by Web 2.0 enabling the SAP CRM 2007 release, and as a way of building its CRM applications moving forward. • Increased focus on analytics: With the acquisition of

Business Objects, marketing performance management is receiving increasing attention to provide marketing users access to insights and simple analytics in a marketing and industry context. Leveraging the Business Objects business intelligence and performance management platforms and Xcelsius Dashboard Builder, SAP has developed several role-based dashboards for marketing users (for example, executives, product marketing managers and channel man-agers), providing these users with KPIs, charts, tables and simple “what if” analysis tools to do some basic scenario planning.

• Consider SAP if you want to standardize on the SAP plat-form, plan to integrate your marketing applications with other SAP business applications and have industry-specif-ic marketing requirements in CPG, high tech or manufac-turing. If you are not interested in the SAP platform or inte-gration with other SAP applications, then consider alterna-tives until there are more solid proof points of SAP as a stand-alone marketing application.

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Cautions

• Lack of depth in some marketing areas: Although SAP has depth in industry functionality for CPG, high tech and manu-facturing, given its client/partner strategy, its marketing solu-tions lack depth, as compared with best-of-breed marketing vendors in some areas of MRM and campaign management, where it remains a challenger. SAP continues to work to close the gap.

• Usability and flexibility lags best-of-breed vendors: Although SAP has improved the usability and flexibility of its marketing applications significantly, it lags behind best-of-breed marketing vendors in this area that continue to invest heavily in the usability and flexibility of their applica-tions.

• Ability to overcome market perceptions: Although SAP’s vision for marketing applications is improving, the ability to execute still lags behind the company’s vision. The market still perceives SAP marketing applications as having poor usability, being inflexible and overly complex. Changing this market view will not be easy and may be one of the biggest challenges for SAP’s marketing applications.

• Weak SaaS strategy: Although SAP offers a SaaS offering for sales force automation and campaign management, customer uptake for this model has been slow, particularly for its campaign management capabilities. At the same time, SAP has not yet made marketing capabilities avail-able in a SaaS model where we have seen more uptake of SaaS in the market, such as MRM (planning, creative pro-duction management and marketing fulfillment). Therefore, its on-demand capabilities for marketing are missing the market and likely costing SAP marketing deals.

• References: Sales of marketing applications continue to outpace implementations. To help convince prospective customers and those that have bought but not implement-ed to consider SAP CRM 2007 for marketing, SAP will neimplement-ed references from marketing users (not IT staff) who have selected the solution and deployed it as a prepackaged solution with little customization. SAP reports that it has many CRM 2007 marketing implementations under way. Therefore, clients should expect more references on the latest version in 2009.

SAS

Strengths

• Increasing market traction: SAS remains a leader in cam-paign management and a pioneer and visionary in market-ing performance management. There has been increased traction during the past six months for marketing campaign optimization and marketing mix/media mix optimization. The increased traction for marketing mix optimization has brought SAS into more creative divisions and higher levels of marketing, and has pushed it to deliver more-strategic consulting services to benefit clients.

• Breadth of adjacent capabilities: Other marketing capabili-ties include customer data integration, customer data min-ing, customer profitability analysis and management, gover-nance and risk management, planning and financial man-agement (MRM). Marketing functionality also includes pric-ing/promotion/packaging, lead management, media plan-ning optimization, e-mail and mobile marketing, Web site and online customer behavior analytics and marketing opti-mization. The Customer Intelligence (CI) v.5.1 provides a single point of control for inbound, outbound and event-trig-gered marketing campaigns.

• Strong analytics: One key strength and differentiator of SAS’s CI solutions is its analytics and marketing perform-ance management capabilities. SAS offers a platform (data management, integration, analytics and business intelli-gence) and SAS-based tools to support closed-loop mar-keting, including basic (reporting, dashboards and KPIs) and advanced (marketing mix, simulation, predictive mod-eling and optimization) marketing analytics. This platform supports bottom-up and top-down planning.

• Strong R&D: Plans for CI v.5.3 in 2009 include a new and integrated Web analytics solution, a new workflow solution and an upgrade to the new SAS platform. Future releases beyond 5.3 will focus on more-advanced, event-triggered marketing capabilities, distributed marketing capabilities, lead management, collaboration capabilities, social net-work analysis and the use of Flash and Flex for rich Internet application user interface.

• Consider SAS for its integrated suite of solutions for data-base marketing (taking customer insights into the interac-tion) and as a platform for EMM, with an emphasis on mar-keting performance management (planning, financial man-agement, profitability manman-agement, pricing and promotion).

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Cautions

• Weak support of operational MRM capabilities: SAS does not provide prepackaged capabilities to support the operational project management aspects of MRM (production manage-ment and marketing fulfillmanage-ment). However, with the release of its new stand-alone workflow tool for marketing users, it may provide some added capabilities in this area in future releas-es and the ability to develop a more prepackaged solution for this area.

• No lead management solution: SAS does not provide a sep-arate solution for lead management. Rather, lead manage-ment capabilities are achieved through the combination and integration of SAS Interaction Management for lead detection and SAS Real-Time Decision Manager for lead routing and execution. SAS provides adapters to integrate with Siebel, PeopleSoft, Oracle, SAP Sales Force Automation and sales-force.com. SAS intends to continue to support clients’ lead management needs through more prepackaged offerings, including a revamping of its distributed marketing module in late-2009. Its new workflow solution could also help speed time to development for more process-oriented lead manage-ment capabilities.

• DAM not fully integrated: DAM capabilities have not been integrated fully across all modules of the CI platform and is one of the missing elements for SAS as an EMM platform to fully support creative and brand management process-es.

• Integration between two modules in the marketing suite: SAS has obtained a few of its marketing applications via acquisitions. While its campaign management module (acquired from Intrinsic in 2001 and completely rewritten in SAS in 2004) has been integrated fully to leverage the value of the SAS platform, the Veridiem marketing mix acquisition has been partially integrated (and is expected to be fully integrated in 2009). However, integration between SAS Interaction Management and other modules is data-level only, and clients report issues with lack of tight integration between Marketing Automation and Interaction Management. Migrating SAS Interaction Management to the SAS platform is on SAS’s road map.

• Local skills in some areas: Although clients state that SAS is a good company to work with and has engaged senior and executive management, clients also cited issues, such as lack of knowledge skills and a lack of expertise with local implementation services and ongoing support in regions out-side North America and Western Europe. To address this

challenge, SAS created global teams with SAS CI domain expertise to provide best-practice support to emerging regions.

• No SaaS alternative: SAS still is viewed as a high-end solution for large enterprises that can be complex and dif-ficult to configure. To gain traction with more midmarket clients, SAS must develop simpler on-demand solutions (multitenant) that are easy for clients to navigate and require fewer technical skills.

Teradata

Strengths

• Strong data driven vision: Teradata’s vision for marketing and CRM is data-centric, driving customer intelligence into multiple channels with MRM managing processes for enablement. Teradata Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) provides a foundation for its single view of the customer to support customer analytics and campaign management solutions with integrations to its partner Assetlink for MRM capabilities.

• Robust campaign management: Teradata provides a broad range of campaign management capabilities for campaign planning and execution, offer management and communi-cation optimization. It also provides analytical tools and models for customer insights, including relationship pricing, next-best activities, propensity to buy, customer-profitability analysis and propensity to churn. MRM capabilities for planning, budgeting, reporting and resource management are provided via integration with Assetlink’s marketing oper-ations management solution. Teradata has partnerships with Attensity for text mining and customer feedback analy-sis.

• Strong focus on data mapping: The Teradata EDW road

map is a tool that enables clients to map data elements to specific analytics and processes. These tools help with the planning and management of data required for implemen-tation and enable companies to prioritize application invest-ments based on available data. Through its logical data models, Teradata provides industry templates of the tool for the retail, financial services, telecom, healthcare, manufac-turing, insurance and travel/transportation industries. • Strong MRM partnership: Integration with Assetlink has been

completed, with testing set to be completed by the end of July 2008. Assetlink has been ported over to Teradata and is run-ning as a native Teradata application. Web services have been

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used to create objects in Teradata Relationship Manager (TRM), such as create campaign and create segment to help with the integration. The Web services and objects also enable integration at the workflow and process layer, as opposed to data integration only. Objects from TRM can be tracked within Assetlink.

• Good R&D investment: The road map for Teradata’s mar-keting solutions include Web 2.0 and digital marmar-keting. Teradata will offer Web data loading, advanced Web ana-lytics and search engine optimization. Long-term plans include social network analysis, targeted advertising, data visualization, constraint-based optimization combined with rule-based optimization and distributed user enablement. • Consider Teradata for its strong customer analysis and

cus-tomer-intelligence-driven marketing solutions.

Cautions

• Need to invest in Teradata EDW: Clients that are not sup-porting or considering Teradata EDW should consider alter-natives as the solutions are optimized for Teradata’s data models and database.

• Lack of clarity for marketing performance management: Although Teradata provides an advanced set of analytical tools for marketing, it does not have a clear vision for keting performance management based on different mar-keting roles. It relies on solutions from Assetlink for report-ing capabilities in this area. Teradata must develop a set of role-based dashboards with visualization and what-if analy-sis to compete with other vendors in the market.

• Partner risk: Teradata does not own Assetlink. If Assetlink is acquired by another vendor, particularly a Teradata com-petitor, then clients with integrated campaign management and MRM capabilities could be at long-term risk of solution upgrades and integration issues.

• Lack of formal partner strategy: Although Teradata has key partners in this area, it must develop a stronger ecosystem of technology and service partners.

• Lack of alternative delivery models: Teradata solutions are deployed primarily on-premises. It does not have a clear strategy for developing on-demand solutions or for cultivat-ing services partners for hostcultivat-ing.

Unica

Strengths

• Strong vision and breadth of capabilities: Unica has a strong vision for EMM focused on using the marketing “system of record” as the platform to support closed-loop marketing processes (analyze, plan, design and produce, execute and measure). Its vision encompasses relation-ship marketing (campaign management), MRM and Internet marketing. Functionality is deep in multichannel, campaign management (integrating online and offline channels). Unica also provides solutions for distributed campaign management for field marketing (Affinium Campaign Collaborate), event-triggered marketing (Affinium Detect), lead management (Affinium Leads) and marketing performance management (Affinium Insight). • Good viability: Unica has one of the largest installed

cus-tomer bases (more than 600 enterprises) for marketing applications, with a 35% compound annual growth rate from fiscal year 2003 to fiscal year 2007. Traditionally, most of its revenue has come from campaign management. In 2007, most of its new revenue came from its Internet mar-keting applications, followed by MRM, with MRM being used to augment Internet marketing for planning, budgeting and project management of Internet marketing programs and campaigns.

• More deployment options: Multiple deployment options, including on-premises, hosted and hybrid models, should open up even more opportunities for growth.

• Strong R&D investments: Unica continues its strong invest-ment in R&D, with 18% to 20% of its revenue going back into R&D. The next release of Affinium in the summer of 2008 will provide improved workflow and markup capabili-ties for MRM (Affinium Plan), more-scalable and integrated interactive marketing (Affinium Interact), multishot and mul-tiwave campaigns in its distributed marketing solution (Affinium Campaign Collaborate) and updates to its dash-boards for Affinium NetInsight and Affinium Insight. Although Unica offers some solutions, such as Internet marketing and MRM (project management) on demand, early 2009 will see the first major release of its on-demand suite, which will include a broader set of MRM capabilities and its campaign management capabilities. Major plans for Affinium in mid-2009 call for a new portal-based graphical user interface that will be leveraged from its on-demand

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solution. Unica’s vision is to enable mashups with a large ecosystem of potential content suppliers (for example, data, services and technology integration).

• Open architecture: It offers an open, Java EE architecture and is database-neutral. The development of marketing “objects” enables the reuse of marketing work that typical-ly is not contained in a file. With Affinium Plan 7.3, users can store parts of a project as a “marketing object” for reuse.

• Consider Unica for its strong relationship and Internet mar-keting capabilities, its open, scalable platform and its broader EMM vision.

Cautions

• Missing depth in key MRM areas: Although Unica contin-ues to invest in its MRM capabilities and to gain traction in the market (Unica reports signing up 10 new enterprise MRM customers), its MRM capabilities still lag behind best-of-breed MRM solutions, particularly in the areas of DAM and marketing fulfillment.

• Lack of a clear vision for marketing performance manage-ment: Although Unica provides a number of standard out-of-the-box reports and offers Web analytics with NetInsight and customer analytics with Insight, it has not demonstrat-ed a broader role-basdemonstrat-ed vision for marketing performance management, as compared with other vendors in the mar-ket. For example, Unica does not offer advanced analytical capabilities for MRM around resource optimization (for example, budgets, people and marketing mix allocations), and it has not demonstrated a clear strategy for developing role-based dashboards to a broad set of marketing users. Although Unica offers a predictive modeling solution, Affinium Model, we see few clients using the solution, with many preferring to integrate SAS models into the Affinium Campaign.

• No event management solution: Unica does not offer a prepackaged solution for event management. Clients can use Affinium Plan for project management of events (tasks, approvals and budget), MarketingCentral’s event calendar to promote events and Affinium Campaign and Affinium Campaign eMessage to invite attendees, track responses and send follow-up messages. Unica does not offer event registration, payment collection, content posting and event production (for example, audiovisual, talent and catering) capabilities. Instead, clients must rely on specialists in these areas.

• No points management system: Although Unica can sup-port loyalty marketing via its campaign management, event-triggered marketing and MRM capabilities, it does not offer a points accounting module. It has no plans to offer a prepackaged solution but will rely on integration with other vendors and solutions for point management.

• Demonstrating B2B understanding: Although Unica is

attracting the interest of more B2B clients, B2B prospects continue to state that Unica does not fully understand the needs of B2B organizations. However, Unica is demon-strating progress in the B2B area after its appointment of a B2B segment manager, and issues appear to be less of a “deal stopper” for B2B organizations than a year ago.

• Continuing expansion of MRM deals beyond campaign

management: Although we are seeing more MRM deals focused on internally driven marketing processes in cre-ative and advertising areas, many of Unica’s MRM deals have been to augment campaign management and, more recently, Internet marketing by improving the planning and budgeting of online and offline marketing campaigns. As compared with pure-play MRM vendors, Unica’s implemen-tations have been more in the direct or database marketing division and increasingly in the Internet marketing or e-commerce division. Clients must carefully evaluate Unica’s product capabilities and should speak with references in more-creative advertising and brand-oriented divisions.

Vendors Added or Dropped

We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants and MarketScopes as markets change. As a result of these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic Quadrant or MarketScope may change over time. A vendor appearing in a Magic Quadrant or MarketScope one year and not the next does not necessarily indicate that we have changed our opinion of that vendor. This may be a reflection of a change in the market and, therefore, changed evaluation criteria, or a change of focus by a vendor.

Gartner RAS Core Research Note G00158623, Kimberly Collins, Adam Sarner, 1 July 2008

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Evaluation Criteria Definitions

Ability to Execute

Product/Service:Core goods and services offered by the vendor that compete in/serve the defined market. This includes cur-rent product/service capabilities, quality, feature sets, skills and so on, whether offered natively or through OEM agreements/part-nerships as defined in the market definition and detailed in the subcriteria.

Overall Viability (Business Unit, Financial, Strategy, Organization):Viability includes an assessment of the overall organization’s financial health, the financial and practical success of the business unit, and the likelihood of the individual business unit to contin-ue investing in the product, to contincontin-ue offering the product and to advance the state of the art within the organization’s portfolio of products.

Sales Execution/Pricing:The vendor’s capabilities in all pre-sales activities and the structure that supports them. This includes deal management, pricing and negotiation, pre-sales support and the overall effectiveness of the sales channel.

Market Responsiveness and Track Record:Ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs evolve and market dynamics change. This criterion also considers the vendor’s history of responsiveness.

Marketing Execution:The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed to deliver the organization’s message to influence the market, promote the brand and business, increase awareness of the products, and establish a positive identification with the product/brand and organization in the minds of buyers. This “mind share” can be driven by a combination of publicity, pro-motional, thought leadership, word-of-mouth and sales activities.

Customer Experience:Relationships, products and services/programs that enable clients to be successful with the products evaluated. Specifically, this includes the ways customers receive technical support or account support. This can also include ancillary tools, customer support programs (and the quality thereof), availability of user groups, service-level agreements and so on.

Operations:The ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments. Factors include the quality of the organizational structure including skills, experiences, programs, systems and other vehicles that enable the organization to operate effectively and efficiently on an ongoing basis.

Completeness of Vision

Market Understanding:Ability of the vendor to understand buyers’ wants and needs and to translate those into products and services. Vendors that show the highest degree of vision listen and understand buyers’ wants and needs, and can shape or enhance those with their added vision.

Marketing Strategy:A clear, differentiated set of messages consistently communicated throughout the organization and exter-nalized through the Web site, advertising, customer programs and positioning statements.

Sales Strategy:The strategy for selling product that uses the appropriate network of direct and indirect sales, marketing, service and communication affiliates that extend the scope and depth of market reach, skills, expertise, technologies, services and the customer base.

Offering (Product) Strategy:The vendor’s approach to product development and delivery that emphasizes differentiation, func-tionality, methodology and feature set as they map to current and future requirements.

Business Model:The soundness and logic of the vendor’s underlying business proposition.

Vertical/Industry Strategy:The vendor’s strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of individual market segments, including verticals.

Innovation:Direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources, expertise or capital for investment, consolida-tion, defensive or pre-emptive purposes.

Geographic Strategy:The vendor’s strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of geographies out-side the “home” or native geography, either directly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries as appropriate for that geography and market.

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0 to 90 in Four Easy Steps: A Marketing Maturity Model

Marketing operations is in the midst of a major revolution. While the tools of marketing have changed dramatically over the past 25 years, the operational systems and processes have remained relatively stagnant. Most organizations use desktop productivity tools and e-mail to plan, deliver and ultimately exe-cute their marketing activities. This is not necessarily a best practice, but a kind of “stalwart tradition” that has been passed on from marketing department to marketing department through the decades.

The good news is that companies all over the world are moving from paralysis to action. According to Gartner research, “By 2010, more than 2,500 MRM deployments will exist (0.8 probabil-ity)1_{.” Most of these companies will start small and take a crawl,}

stand, walk, run approach that will ultimately grow their invest-ment based on the return they glean from their initial efforts. Many marketing organizations that are starting out on their jour-ney to improved operational effectiveness would like a roadmap that will help them compare themselves to others who have already begun the journey. Based on its experience with more than 200 companies on this trajectory, Aprimo has developed a Marketing Operations Maturity Model (MOMM) that will help shed a light on the path that lies in front of organizations that have made a choice to elevate their ability for marketing to deliver value.

Maturity models have been developed for a wide variety of tech-nology and business processes. They aggregate the experi-ences that many organizations have gone through from the growth curve of ad hoc and unstructured processes to a highly optimized end state. The MOMM developed by Aprimo pro-vides the following benefits:

• It communicates to everyone involved that improve-ments in marketing operations come through a sys-tematic and multiphase approach.

- A single “process improvement project” will not deliver the value that is sought after.

• It gives everyone a place to start from.

- Oftentimes organizations that have severely broken oper-ational processes are overwhelmed by the task ahead. The MOMM breaks the mountain down to a series of steps that can be conquered over a period of several years.

• It provides a framework for prioritizing actions.

- Organizations are always faced with the challenge of allo-cating resources to these types of efforts. The MOMM helps to focus these investments on steps that will allow the achievement of next steps.

• It allows organizations to understand the experiences and challenges that other companies have faced in their journey to marketing effectiveness.

- The knowledge gained from other companies tackling the MOMM will validate their decision and help to inform and guide the MOMM initiative.

• Finally, the MOMM provides a means of assessing an organization’s success.

- The accumulated data allows comparisons across mul-tiple companies top provide a benchmark from which to measure success.

Organizations that begin a journey of this type will face numer-ous challenges and obstacles before they reach their ultimate success level. In talking with companies all over the world, the struggle for progress is universal and can sometimes be over-whelming. With average tenure of a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) now under two years (and shrinking), the need for oper-ational enhancements to provide transparent value is higher than ever before. When new leadership arrives on the scene, process owners can show how they are aligned to one of the steps in the MOMM. When other organizational changes occur – ranging from tactical reorganizations all the way to broad consolidation of multiple marketing organizations – huge pressure is placed on the marketing organization to move in a new direction. Again, the MOMM can serve as an anchor to stay the course in turbulent times.

The MOMM

The MOMM is based on the ISO 9000 marketing maturity model that has been used extensively by companies to evaluate the effectiveness of their processes relative to a global standard. Similarly, the MOMM framework helps marketers to define a “true north” so that they can see where they are, what steps they need to progress through and where they ultimately can arrive at. The model also provides guidance on specific actions and priorities that a marketing organization can take to move from a stage of chaos to one this highly optimized.

“Aprimo has developed a Marketing

Operations Maturity Model that will help

shed a light on the path that lies in front

of organizations that have made a

choice to elevate their ability for

marketing to deliver value.”

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Ad Hoc

Marketing organizations start out at a level referred to as ad hoc. This describes the raw state of marketing without any explicit attempt to automate the processes. As a marketing organiza-tion grows in complexity, geography and increased demands for accountability, this stage becomes increasingly dysfunctional. • Documentation is sporadic and may exist for a few key

processes, but not most.

• A “superman” mentality is in play. Successful completion of work is usually dependent on the heroic efforts of a few peo-ple.

• Measurement is either nonexistent or intermittent

• There is no accountability because there is no measure-ment.

• The primary tools of the trade are e-mail, spreadsheets and paper job jackets. Many organizations will use MS Project, but the data is accessible only to the project manager who is left to single-handedly enforce project schedules. • Management is reactive rather than proactive. REPEATABLE

Marketing organizations usually reach a Repeatable level after they have made their first significant effort to document their process and implement some type of marketing resource manage-ment (MRM) software to ensure that new processes are followed. Key characteristics of a company that has achieved this level are:

• Processes are identified and documented. Everyone in the organization should know how they fit into the grand scheme.

• Requests for marketing outputs are formalized. Requesters of marketing output must now make a formal request for work, usually backed up with some type of brief or structured form.

• Some type of integrated marketing technology is in place to facilitate the documented processes.

MANAGED

The Managed level of maturity is really a refinement of the gains that were established in the Repeatable level. Organizations reach this plateau after they have extended their investments in marketing technology and process improvements. Key character-istics are:

• Performance is systematically measured and the results, across each role in the organization , are available to all who are involved.

• Technology is used to ensure that all workflows are man-aged and repeated, according to the most ideal established processes.

• Results are always measured in a quantifiable manner. OPTIMIZED

Very few marketing organizations have achieved the Optimized level of the MOMM. Typically this level of achievement requires three to five years of continued investment and focus on improvement in process and measurement. In some ways, this level of attainment parallels the learning of a foreign language in adulthood. During the early phases of this process, individu-als will hear something in a foreign tongue, translate it to their native tongue and then reverse the process when they want to speak. At some point, their competency reaches a point where this intermediate translation is not necessary. When organiza-tions reach the Optimized level of maturity, their natural acorganiza-tions become consistent with the process. They become fluent. Key requirements to achieve this level of success are:

• Processes are quick and nimble. While the emphasis of early levels of maturity is on repeatable structure, the focus at the Optimized level shifts to accommodating various complexities that are vital to outstanding performance. • Measurement advances to a broader assessment of

mar-keting effectiveness. Earlier levels tend to focus on improv-ing specific performance, whereas Optimized steps back and looks at broader pictures of effectiveness.

• Systematic optimization of resources for maximum impact is fundamental to this level of maturity. Because everyone is “in the process,” the systems can now help allocate

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resources and activities in a manner that opt

O to 90 in Four Easy Steps: A Marketing Maturity Model