I’m pleased to announce that we have just published The Forrester Wave™: Real-Time Interaction Management, Q2 2017. This evaluation includes 12 vendors that address RTIM, which Forrester defines as: enterprise marketing technology that delivers contextually relevant experiences, value, and utility at the appropriate moment in the customer life cycle via preferred customer touchpoints.

Vendor capabilities have evolved since we published our first RTIM evaluation in 2015, and the new report recognizes 5 leaders – SAS, Pegasystems, Teradata, Adobe, and IBM – all with unique technology approaches to address RTIM requirements. Salesforce, FICO, Pitney Bowes, Infor, and Emarsys are strong performers. And, Rocket Fuel and IgnitionOne are contenders, representing emergent RTIM capabilities for advertising use cases. The continued convergence of martech and adtech will further drive use cases for both anonymous and authenticated customers as the RTIM space evolves.

Not only are we seeing vendors apply RTIM to advertising and customer acquisition strategies, but we are seeing deeper integrations with sales, service, and operational environments to better address up-sell, cross-sell, retention, and loyalty requirements. We are further seeing customer-initiated interaction volumes increase dramatically as brands strive to personalize content and offers across an ever-expanding range of channels and touchpoints. In addition, this year’s evaluation includes criteria for artificial intelligence and emerging IoT capabilities.

We asked customer references, “What capabilities do you currently deploy or support with your RTIM solution?” We saw some interesting results compared to 2015. There was tremendous growth in all but two sectors – eCommerce, where dedicated personalization and recommendation engines usually provide RTIM functionality – and mobile, where custom development usually addresses RTIM requirements. The largest growth areas were web and social media personalization, as vendors apply more next-best-action rigor to digital channels. Watch this space, as customer expectations for cross-channel consistency continue to drive RTIM technology evolution.

I encourage you to download and review The Forrester Wave™: Real-Time Interaction Management, Q2 2017. If you have questions, feel free to send me an email or set up an inquiry – or request a one-to-one meeting if you plan to attend Forrester’s Digital Transformation Europe 2017 summit in London on June 8 and 9. If you want to discuss the role of RTIM in your enterprise marketing technology ecosystem, we’re here to help.