Last week, Cory Munchbach and I published the first-ever Forrester Wave: Enterprise Marketing Software Suites, Q4 2014. Or, as they are popularly referred to, the “marketing clouds.” The evaluation looked at the eight vendors vying to convince marketers of their ability to provide an integrated portfolio of products that span all of marketing’s needs. Integration is increasingly important to marketers in their efforts to understand the full customer life-cycle and be able to execute across all interactions.

 

Forrester defines an enterprise marketing software suite (EMSS) as: an integrated portfolio of marketing technology products that provide analytics, automation, and orchestration of insight-driven customer interactions to support inbound and outbound marketing. In the study, we found a marketplace that is dynamic and evolving very quickly, with vendors adding new functionality at a frequent cadence. We expect to see considerable innovation and progress from each vendor in order to integrate their suite offerings further. We also found that the implementations of EMSS’ vary widely, with a diversity of use-cases reported by the vendor’s customers. These customers also want to see the EMSS vendors minimize the effort to integrate data from existing sources and offer more functionality that multiple product modules share.

 

Forrester clients can read the full report here, but keep in mind that the written report just scratches the surface of the full evaluation. Download the interactive scorecard tool and use it to customize the Forrester Wave model for your organization’s needs. Join us on November 3rd for a webinar on the findings and if you need additional guidance on a specific provider, please feel free to set up an inquiry.