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VERIVO APPMOBI APPCELERATOR FEEDHENRY KONY RHOMOBILE XAMA MARKETO HUBSPOT SALES ENGINE INTERNATIONAL CRIMSON HEXAGON CISION ACT-ON ATTENSITY SYSOMOS TERADATA EACON EQUILIBRIUM CANTO WAVE RAZUNA NETXPOSURE EVOLPHIN DURASPACE EXTENSIS FOTOWARE MERL BRANDWORKZ CELUM SAP SALESFORCE GOOGLE IBM OPENTEXT ORACLE MICROSOFT HP ALLA BRANDWATCH SYNTHESIO SPRINKLR HOOTSUITE The Marketing Automation & Social Technology Evaluation Report Excerpt of Comprehensive Product Evaluations Sample Edition, Sample License

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Page 1: The Marketing Automation & Social Technology Evaluation …€¦ ·  · 2018-04-13SPRINKLR HOOTSUITE The Marketing Automation & Social Technology Evaluation Report Excerpt of Comprehensive

VERIVO

APPMOBI

APPCELERATOR

FEEDHENRY

KONY

RHOMOBILE

XAMAR

MARKETO

HUBSPOT

SALES ENGINEINTERNATIONAL

CRIMSON HEXAGON

CISION

ACT-ON

ATTENSITY

SYSOMOS

TERADATA

ABEACON

EQUILIBRIUM

CANTO

WAVE

RAZUNA

NETXPOSURE

EVOLPHIN

DURASPACE

EXTENSIS

FOTOWARE

MERLIN

BRANDWORKZ

CELUM

SAP

SALESFORCE

GOOGLE

IBMOPENTEXT

ORACLE

MICROSOFT

HP

WALLA

BRANDWATCH

SYNTHESIO

SPRINKLR

HOOTSUITE

The Marketing Automation & Social Technology Evaluation Report

Excerpt of Comprehensive Product Evaluations

Sample Edition, Sample License

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Marketing Automation & Social Technology Sample Edition, Sample Licensei © Copyright 2016 Real Story Group.

All Rights Reserved.

Act-On Software

Adobe

Attensity

Brandwatch

Cision

Crimson Hexagon

Hootsuite

HubSpot

IBM

Infusionsoft

Marketo

Oracle

Salesforce

Sales Engine International

SDL

Sprinklr

Synthesio

Sysomos

Teradata

Vuture

Vendors Reviewed

This list of vendors reflects the contents of the full report. This sample only reviews IBM.

Vendors Reviewed

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Table of Contents

Table of Contents (from full report)

Part 1: Executive Summary

A short intro to key concepts 1

Part 2: The Business Case for Marketing Technology 8

Part 3: Marketing Technology Dissected

How marketing automation & social technology tools really work

11

Part 4: Universal Scenarios: The Key to Comparing Technologies 46

Part 5: Marketing Vendor Evaluations 52

Guide to the Charts 52

Digital Marketing Platform Vendors 55

Adobe: Adobe Marketing Cloud 60

IBM: Enterprise Marketing Mgmt. & Social Media Analytics 72

Oracle: Social Relationship Management 82

Salesforce: ExactTarget Marketing Cloud 96

Marketing Automation Suite Vendors 117

Act-On Software: Act-On 126

HubSpot: HubSpot Marketing Software 137

IBM: Silverpop Engage 150

Infusionsoft: Infusionsoft 162

Marketo: Engagement Marketing Platform 172

Oracle: Eloqua 184

Sales Engine International: Marketing Automation 198

Salesforce: ExactTarget Email 204

Salesforce: Pardot Marketing Automation 215

Teradata: Integrated Marketing Management 225

Vuture: Vuture 232

Social Media Analysis Platforms 239

Attensity: Attensity 248

Brandwatch: Brandwatch Analytics 255

Cision: Visible Intelligence 264

This table of contents reflects the contents of the full report. This sample report only reviews IBM: Enterprise Marketing Mgmt./Social Media Analytics

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Crimson Hexagon: ForSight 275

Hootsuite: Hootsuite Enterprise 284

SDL: Social Intelligence SM2 295

Sprinklr: Experience Cloud 307

Synthesio: Synthesio Platform 316

Sysomos: MAP and Heartbeat 327

Part 6: Ten Pitfalls and Best Practices

Ten Common Pitfalls to Avoid (and Best Practices to Follow)

334

Vendor Index 339

Table of Contents, Cont.

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Digital Marketing Platform Vendors

LEGEND: 0 1 2 3 4 Poor Fit –––––––––– Better Fit

Scenario Summary: Digital Marketing Platform Vendors

Digital Marketing Scenarios

Ad

ob

e

IBM

Ora

cle

Sal

esfo

rce

Social Media Monitoring 3

Social Media Intelligence 2

Social Marketing Campaigns 1

Social Customer Support & Engagement 0

B2C Lead & Offer Management 3

B2B Lead Management & Nurturing 1

Mobile Marketing 2

The Use Case Scenarios are very useful tools within our evaluation reports. You can quickly identify which scenarios apply to your particular needs. We rate each product in relation to these scenarios, so you quickly can determine which products may — or may not — be a good fit.

Scenario Summary

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LEGEND: 0 1 2 3 4 Poor Fit –––––––––– Better Fit

Ratings Summary: Digital Marketing Platform Vendors

Functional Business Services

Ad

ob

e

IBM

Ora

cle

Sal

esfo

rce

Marketing Automation Services

Lead Management & Nurturing 1

Campaign Management 2

Landing Pages 1

Social Media Analysis

Data Collection & Processing 2

Analysis & Presentation 3

Social Media Marketing Services

Social Media Site Management 1

Social Campaigns 2

Influencer Cultivation 0

Social Customer Support 1

Ratings Summary

Our reports contain charts with summary evaluation ratings of every product that we cover. This enables you to compare and contrast the strengths and weaknesses of specific products quickly, so you can focus on the criteria that are most important to your needs.

Digital Marketing Platform Vendors

Table Continued on Next Page

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LEGEND: 0 1 2 3 4 Poor Fit –––––––––– Better Fit

Functional Business Services

Ad

ob

e

IBM

Ora

cle

Sal

esfo

rce

Technology & Admin Services

Security 3

Scalability 4

Integration 1

Enterprise Administration 3

Vendor Intangibles

Vendor Professional Services 2

Channel Partner Services 3

Support & Community 1

Strategy & Roadmap 1

Viability & Stability 3

Ratings Summary, Cont.Digital Marketing Platform Vendors

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IBM: Enterprise Marketing Mgmt/Social Media Analytics

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IBM: Enterprise Marketing Management & Social Media Analytics

Vendor at a Glance

Specsheet IBM: EMM & SMA

Geography Global

What’s New • IBM has rebranded several acquired products and begun a complex integration process

• UI enhancements to IBM Campaign include a new flowchart-based UI for campaign creations

Strengths • Provides capabilities across a broad spectrum of enterprise marketing services, including support for digital and offline activities

• Offers both traditional back-office marketing management services and more modern digital campaign functionality

• Most services are highly customizable and extensible

• The company has a genuinely global footprint and most tools have been broadly localized in an impressive array of languages

• One of the few vendors who can support large-scale B2C efforts

• Good integration with other IBM platforms (Cognos, Commerce, WebSphere Portal)

• Social Media Analytics platform has broad reporting capabilities

Weaknesses • An IBM-oriented approach will almost surely require you to cobble together a wide array of products

• Huge product line is complex, confusing, overlapping, inconsistent, and still poorly integrated

• Solution set remains surprisingly weak in the areas of Marketing Automation and Social Marketing & Engagement

• Any IBM solution is likely to be very expensive and resource heavy

• Company has comparatively sluggish innovation/release cycles

• Very poor fit for most B2B scenarios

• Social Media Analytics platform is complex and not very user friendly

www.ibm.com

Subsequent to introductory chapters, summaries, and ratings charts, we provide in-depth evaluations of each product we cover. These evaluations provide details about the strengths and weaknesses of the products, and give insight and explanations of the ratings. Below is a sample; each product is evaluated using the same criteria.

Table Continued on Next Page

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IBM: Enterprise Marketing Mgmt/Social Media Analytics

Specsheet IBM: EMM & SMA

Potential Fit Social Media Monitoring, B2C Lead & Offer Management

Unlikely Fit Most B2B scenarios, Social Marketing, Social Customer Support, most simple scenarios

Compare To Oracle, Adobe, Salesforce

Delivery Model On-premise and some cloud, depending on the module

Licensing Module dependent, likely starting at low six figures and escalating rapidly from there

Ownership Public (NYSE: IBM)

SummaryIBM’s digital marketing offerings for the most part lie within its broader Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) umbrella. IBM EMM is not so much an “integrated suite;” it is a loose collection of about fifty distinct products of diverse origins and architectures.

IBM’s EMM group is part of the Industry Solutions division, which is part of the Systems Software division. Within the Industry Solutions division, one of the key groups is called “Smarter Commerce” which consists of solutions for B2B and B2C commerce. This group includes the WebSphere Commerce Server and a host of other tools that IBM has acquired over the years. The main ones amongst these are Sterling Commerce, iLog, Unica (for digital marketing and cross-channel campaigns), Coremetrics (for web analytics), Cognos and SPSS (for business intelligence), DemandTec (for pricing optimization and planning tool for retailers), and Tealeaf (website monitoring or record & replay of user interactions). IBM’s most recent acquisition — Marketing automation vendor Silverpop — will also swell these ranks.

Digital Marketing Scenarios

Social Media Monitoring 3

Social Media Intelligence 2

Social Marketing Campaigns 1

Social Customer Support & Engagement 0

B2C Lead & Offer Management 3

B2B Lead Management & Nurturing 1

Mobile Marketing 2

IBM EMM is not so much an “integrated suite;” it is a loose collection of about fifty distinct products of diverse origins and architectures.

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IBM: Enterprise Marketing Mgmt/Social Media Analytics

Each of these platforms has numerous products and modules. In particular, marketing automation and social marketing functionality has been split across disparate products at a time when many competitors can offer a straightforward, point solution to these challenges. Some of the pieces of EMM are integrated but many are not. IBM’s rather sluggish release cadence means that most of its digital and social marketing technology lags its pure-play competitors, even while some of its multichannel and marketing resource management capabilities remain quite impressive, particularly for large-scale B2C efforts.

Although IBM will offer you a putative solution for almost any requirement, it most likely will not be a single offering — or even come from a single product family — and the structure of the solution will typically vary from salesperson to salesperson, or integrator to integrator.

Consider IBM if you are an existing IBM customer and need some these broader capabilities — particularly if your firm lies within the Consumer Product Goods and related sectors, or you

Although IBM will offer you a putative solution for almost any requirement, it most likely will not be a single offering — or even come from a single product family.

Figure 1. The IBM Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) solution categories. Source: IBM.

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IBM: Enterprise Marketing Mgmt/Social Media Analytics

have large amounts of consumer data to leverage in multichannel marketing campaigns. That’s really the only way you can justify IBM’s steep price tags and complex implementations.

For other digital marketing scenarios — particularly B2B scenarios — IBM will surely be overkill. Moreover, even if you are an active Big Blue customer, you should not assume that one IBM product under the EMM umbrella will work effectively with another.

IntroductionThe EMM solution has four main product families, all acquired by IBM over the past several years:

• DemandTec – For price optimization

• Unica – For cross-channel marketing with a B2C emphasis, as well as a slew of Marketing Resource Management (MRM) services

• Coremetrics – For web analytics and related services, also with a B2C bent

• Tealeaf – For recording web visitor sessions to support CRM, audit, and research needs

IBM acquired Unica in 2010. Unica itself was founded in 1992 as an MRM vendor and has gradually evolved into a platform that provides a wide variety of marketing support services through several acquisitions over the years. Most Unica technology was and is designed for on-premise deployment, though IBM is slowly adding some modules to its own cloud platform.

Coremetrics was an independent web analytics vendor IBM acquired in 2010. Most Coremetrics services were already running natively as SaaS solutions.

These products have been rebranded as formal IBM offerings. Among them, the major product offerings we review in this report are:

• IBM Marketing Center

• IBM (formerly Unica) Campaign

• IBM (formerly Unica) eMessage

Even if you are an active Big Blue customer, you should not assume that one IBM product under the EMM umbrella will work effectively with another.

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IBM: Enterprise Marketing Mgmt/Social Media Analytics

• IBM (formerly Coremetrics) Digital Marketing Optimization

• IBM (formerly Unica) LIVEmail

• IBM eMessage

• IBM Email Optimization

Thus far, the former Unica products have had two upgrades: version 9.0 around Q1 2013, and v 9.1 in Q3 2013. In some cases, the changes were mostly cosmetic; in other cases, significant functionality and integration connectors were added.

For social media analytics, IBM will point you to a solution from the Cognos suite called Social Media Analytics (formerly “Cognos Consumer Insight”), which also has some connectors to SPSS for deeper, predictive analytics.

In this report, we review Silverpop separately, despite the fact that IBM acquired it in April 2014. Amusingly, when Real Story Group asked IBM for an across-the-platform demonstration of EMM, SMA, and Silverpop, it wasn’t possible — making it even more evident that these products are not yet integrated.

Marketing Automation Services

It is with Marketing Automation that you begin to see the split among IBM’s product line. The main pieces are:

• IBM Campaign

• IBM Marketing Center

• A slew of email marketing modules

Marketing Center was introduced in late 2012, but still seems to be finding its way. It includes some Unica and Coremetrics legacy bits, but it was mostly a bespoke effort. Unlike Campaign, it’s provided as a SaaS platform. IBM markets it as a kind of “training wheels” that a smaller or less-sophisticated marketing department could license before switching to the more sophisticated IBM Campaign.

Like other EMM offerings, Marketing Center is very analytics-driven (that’s good), but for digital marketers, perhaps a little light on execution (that’s bad). The idea is that you can create personalized messages and then send them out via email or drop them into placeholders on your site. In theory, this should allow you to align email and website messaging more closely; in

Marketing Automation Services

Lead Management & Nurturing 1

Campaign Management 2

Landing Pages 1

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IBM: Enterprise Marketing Mgmt/Social Media Analytics

practice however, Marketing Center remains a work in progress. The interface is a bit kludgy, and IBM’s rich text editor seems unusually buggy and cryptic — even by the low standards for such things. In particular, the website personalization approach seems a bit daunting; Marketing Center delivers content to your pages via JavaScript inserts that make calls to IBM’s data centers. We’re not sure you want to build your pages that way, but it does off-load some complex computing to IBM. There is no integration with packaged CMS tools. On the

plus side, if you already license Coremetrics for web analytics, Marketing Center will work off of those same tags; for analytics, you don’t need to add (yet another) tag to the page.

For email marketing — unlike several other IBM alternatives — you can actually organize campaigns and apply some basic business rules to them. Like some other IBM services, a nice multi-device preview function emulates how the

message will look in different environments. That’s handy.

In contrast, IBM Campaign was built for managing the full cycle of large, multichannel, B2C campaigns. Its sophisticated software is designed to run on-premise, so it can leverage the kinds of massive data warehouses around customer records that you find in large-scale B2C efforts. Unfortunately, some of the more modern digital marketing components feel a bit like add-ons, and tend to drag down what is otherwise a very impressive suite of services designed to offer a unified view of the customer with a coherent approach to reach her.

With Version 9, IBM undertook a user interface refresh, getting rid of some legacy ActiveX controls in favor of using the Dojo JavaScript

Figure 2. Creating Campaigns in Marketing Center. Source: IBM.

With Version 9, IBM undertook a user interface refresh, getting rid of some legacy ActiveX controls in favor of using the Dojo JavaScript library.

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IBM: Enterprise Marketing Mgmt/Social Media Analytics

library. Unfortunately, this has proved rather buggy, and it appears that customers are delaying upgrades, which also may be because the new version requires IE9 and doesn’t support Chrome.

On the plus side, the new version allows marketers to leverage Coremetrics-oriented data about customers’ online activities within Unica. It’s also more tightly integrated with IBM WebSphere Portal and IBM Commerce.

For the email piece within Campaign, you have to turn to one or more of three (!) alternatives from IBM:

• IBM eMessage – With this product, you can preview your emails in different clients, create dynamic content, and send messages to specific customer segments. Nothing fancy, but it works.

• IBM Email Optimization – This platform is really designed for mass email blasts with an emphasis on deliverability to consumer-oriented services (Gmail, AOL, Hotmail, et al.), as well as mobile devices. It comes with some very nice previews, simulations and tracking reports, including virality via social networks. However, it does not have a notion of campaigns and there are no personalization or other B2B services.

• IBM LIVEmail (formerly Coremetrics LIVEmail) – This is designed for large enterprises that have their own mailing infrastructure or use a major service provider (ESP), and want to use their own legacy data as the source for segmentation and analytics. LIVEmail closes the loop between your email system and your source data.

Figure 4. Within Campaign, there’s a flowchart-like interface to create cross-channel (including print) campaigns. Source: IBM.

Figure 3. Multi-device previews within Marketing Center. Source: IBM.

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IBM: Enterprise Marketing Mgmt/Social Media Analytics

Social Media Analysis ServicesFor social media analysis services, you would turn to a different product (outside the EMM group), aptly called, “Social Media Analytics,” now in version 1.3. Like the other IBM modules though, it seems designed for large-scale e-commerce support, and you likely only want to consider it if you already license the broader Cognos platform (and ideally SPSS too). Unlike most other social media analytics tools, IBM’s offering is designed to run on-premise, although Big Blue offers a slightly truncated version as a SaaS offering.

With Social Media Analytics, you query source data from BoardReader.com via a master IBM license with that service. BoardReader itself crawls forums, blogs, and social networks from around the world in multiple languages. If you want to include a source that BoardReader doesn’t cover, you need developers to write “data fetchers” via a data fetcher SDK that comes with the IBM platform. The new source data is written to a local Hadoop store in a very specific format, so the platform can query it and BoardReader at the same time.

Figure 5. email creation interface in eMessage. Source: IBM.

Social Media Analysis

Data Collection & Processing 2

Analysis & Presentation 3

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IBM: Enterprise Marketing Mgmt/Social Media Analytics

You create initial queries using Boolean logic and BoardReader (plus any extended sources you’re fetching), returns a set of “documents.” You can restrict the queries by source type, language, and date ranges. Note that in both the on-premise and SaaS versions of Social Media Analytics, IBM limits the number of documents you can retrieve monthly, based on your license fee; you pay more to get more.

The analysis part is complicated and requires advanced skills, but it is potentially very powerful. Once you have your base set of documents for a project, you use “types” to filter text snippets, which are then filtered further via “concepts” and “hotwords.” Little of this is point-and-click, but it’s highly functional.

You can schedule the reports that get generated, and IBM starts you out with several handy dashboards for reviewing results. The reports look impressive, but you may find them a little thin in terms of how you can interact with them relative to other systems we evaluate in this report.

As you would expect, IBM touts its analytics prowess here. The platform supports:

• Behavioral Analysis – Albeit using fairly coarse-grained buckets

• Segmentation – To categorize audiences by demographics and other attributes like Klout score

• Evolving Topics – Using term co-occurrence to spot trends and understand brand reference context

• Share of Voice – To understand the intensity of discussion of your brand

• Sentiment Analysis – Using IBM’s proprietary linguistic analysis technology

All the usual caveats apply here, particularly about how short-form posts (e.g., Twitter and Facebook) can distort even the most advanced topical and (especially) sentiment analysis. IBM itself encourages customers to try to filter to larger snippets.

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Social Media Marketing ServicesIBM is long on analytics, but short on engagement. In particular, you’ll find Social Media Marketing services are spread thinly across multiple modules.

Some of the former Coremetrics modules have some social outreach features. IBM Campaign supports “dialogues” via Twitter and Facebook, but few licensees seem to actually use this capability, perhaps because the platform is used by a different team within large marketing organizations.

Big Blue itself will march out its “Interact” platform (née Unica). This is an automated system for responding to inbound messages that arrive via email, call-centers, and websites, using rules you set up in advance. IBM extended the platform to support mobile apps and social network-based inquiries, but it’s unclear whether and how customers are actually using it. We would caution you against any over-automated solution in a social media context.

Interact is an on-premise solution, so it can tie into large, internal customer datamarts that major IBM customers deploy.

IBM is long on analytics, but short on engagement.

Figure 6. Sample “Share of Voice” report. Source: IBM.

Social Media Marketing Services

Social Media Site Management 1

Social Campaigns 2

Influencer Cultivation 0

Social Customer Support 1

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Technology & Admin Services

For the most part, IBM excels here. Your challenge comes with the fact that some modules — having gone through one or more owners before they came to IBM — will vary in how easily you administer them. Security is a good example. Most of the products we reviewed supported SSO. Almost all of them have a rich set of roles and groups to leverage, and you’re going to have to test each one separately.

From an integration standpoint, we see a kind of parochialism that comes with all large vendors (e.g., Microsoft). That is, IBM is completely focused on trying to integrate its ~50 digital marketing tools with each other as well as with other IBM platforms. IBM doesn’t seem interested in integrating outside Big Blue. Case in point is Web CMS integration, which is increasingly a priority among pure-play digital marketing vendors (and to some extent even Adobe), but it is seemingly absent from IBM’s roadmap. One exception here is IBM’s solid integration with various Email Service Providers (ESPs).

You’ll find a similar story with respect to enterprise administration. In most tools, IBM has done a good job with supporting system-wide configurations and configuration management, at various levels. In a few cases, administrative services remain thin. On the plus side, IBM has an almost unblemished record with respect to scalability. Almost all of these systems were designed — or IBM bent them — to support marketing programs on a massive scale. The on-premise systems generally use well-known infrastructure combinations with suitable clusterability. We have not heard complaints about performance in the IBM cloud, though that model is much newer.

Vendor Intangibles

IBM generally scores well here, but it’s going to cost you. Let’s start with the good stuff. IBM’s documentation is comparatively ample. IBM sports a large, global services team with reasonable depth in most of these tools. Failing that, they can point you to an array of integrators (mostly largish) that can implement these platforms. Just make sure that the integrator you pick actually has depth in the

Technology & Admin Services

Security 3

Scalability 4

Integration 1

Enterprise Administration 3

Vendor Intangibles

Vendor Professional Services 2

Channel Partner Services 3

Support & Community 1

Strategy & Roadmap 1

Viability & Stability 3

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IBM: Enterprise Marketing Mgmt/Social Media Analytics

combination of tools you deploy. IBM also has a technical certification program, although it doesn’t always keep up with the latest major releases.

With respect to community, the story is mixed. On the one hand, you can find user groups for most of these tools around the world, and IBM itself will host regional meetings. On the other hand, the online resource base feels thin, with many light or empty forums. It doesn’t seem like a vibrant customer base, and IBM EMM specialists do not seem to post much of any depth beyond marketing palaver.

IBM’s release cycles have been comparatively slow, though here again, it depends on the module. Like Oracle, IBM prides itself on the localization of its toolset (which probably delays some releases), but IBM tends to march to the much slower drum-beat of clientele with complex, on-premise installations, rather than the faster innovation and bug-fix pace of pure-cloud vendors.

You will find it a challenge to get accurate pricing information. IBM salespeople themselves are challenged to figure out all of the SKUs. For on-premise installations, you generally will pay by some combination of server, data volume, seats, and optional modules. For SaaS-based models, you’ll pay by some combination of server calls, data volume, and optional modules. In our experience, IBM tends to be generous about seat licenses; these are not systems that workaday employees use — they’re used by a smallish core of digital marketing specialists. In general, though, IBM solutions here are going to be pricier than what you would find elsewhere, not just in terms of initial licensing, but also implementation and long-term TCO. These are big systems for big customers with big challenges.

Conclusion

Even by the standards of this “platform” category, IBM’s digital marketing capabilities are spread across an extraordinary range of separate products. In theory, IBM offers a wider variety of capabilities than any other vendor does, but these capabilities are so widely dispersed — and sometimes duplicated — across multiple offerings, that you will have to work very hard to find the right combination for you.

Some of these offerings are reasonably well integrated, but some are only lightly coupled. In practice, you’re looking at a set of toolkits that will require substantial work on your part in order to piece them together into a holistic solution. This is advanced technology for only the most tech-savvy customers.

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IBM: Enterprise Marketing Mgmt/Social Media Analytics

In almost any scenario, you will need to invest in integration and implementation resources. Ensure that you have sufficient technical horsepower in-house, or via a systems integrator — and make sure any integrator has expertise across a multitude of IBM technologies.

If you can pull all of that together, then you have a shot at realizing the dream of a full-cycle, highly scalable, B2C-oriented digital marketing technology platform.

In theory, IBM offers a wider variety of capabilities than any other vendor does, but these capabilities are so widely dispersed — and sometimes duplicated across multiple offerings — that you will have to work very hard to find the right combination for you.

If you have hands-on experience with this product and wish to share your feedback, please write to us at [email protected]. All customer input is kept confidential.

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