2014 Predictions Show; A Resounding Success
Well, that was fun, wasn't it?
Thanks to Scott for being such a great sport about all the fun Twitter banter. If you missed any of that classic episode, stop over to this blog post which captured all the #BeardOrNoBeard posts in one succinct little blog. Here's a teaser:
Back to the Show
After some introductions we jumped into the main news stories of the show:
Swing over to the On Demand page to catch all the commentary following each of the main stories listed below.
- Oracle in $1.5 Billion Cloud Marketing Buy - Oracle, the world’s No. 2 business software maker, said it would buy cloud-based marketing software maker Responsys in a deal valued at $1.5 billion. Responsys makes cloud-based software that businesses use to manage their marketing campaigns across e-mail, mobile and the Internet. Oracle, led by Larry Ellison, is boosting its cloud software business to fend off competition from nimbler rivals such as Salesforce.com, who offer Internet-based software products at prices that often undercut Oracle.
- Upland Software Acquires Clickability from Limelight - December 23, 2013, Upland Software, one of the world’s largest cloud providers of enterprise work management software, announced that it has acquired Clickability, a leading cloud-based platform for web content management. Upland purchased the business from Limelight Networks, which acquired Clickability in 2011 and changed its name to Orchestrate TM Content Management. Upland will be reinstating the Clickability brand name.
- Marketo to Acquire Personalization Platform Provider Insightera - Marketo recently announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Insightera, a real-time personalization platform for websites and mobile applications. When combined with Marketo's rich behavioral data, targeting capabilities, and multi-channel engagement engine, the acquisition unlocks unique capabilities to unify customer conversations across channels and create digital experiences that are personalized for each and every customer. This move delivers on a key element of Marketo's multi-channel relationship marketing vision and reaffirms Marketo's position as the leading innovator in the fast-growing marketing software category.
- Chatter of Acquia's Possible IPO - On December 11th, Scott Raynovich of Rayno Media posted an article on CMSWire titled – Inside the Road to Acquia's Possible IPO. In the article Scott states that the open-source model for software is shaking up the Web Content Management business. One company that has greatly benefited from this is Acquia, one of the Boston area's most successful startups. Co-founded by Drupal's creator in 2007, Acquia has doubled its revenues in each of the last two years and sparked chatter of a US initial public offering (IPO) in 2014. The strength may have come as a surprise to some folks in the traditional CMS space, who have tried to downplay the idea of Drupal becoming a serious enterprise product. But customers say the flexibility and speed of innovation in the Drupal space are for real.
- Internet of Things Valued at $19 Trillion - It’s widely known that John Chambers, chairman and CEO of Cisco Systems, likes big numbers. In a keynote at the 2014 International CES in Las Vegas, he may have picked his biggest number yet. He pegged the value of the evolving Internet of Things — or Internet of Everything, as Cisco calls it — at $19 trillion.
Scott Liewehr's 2014 Industry Predictions
Talk about 'on the spot'. The show ended with a short piece on what we will likely see in 2014. Several items were touched on periodically throughout the show; and with time running down, the lads laid it out for us. They were:
- Customer Experience Management (CEM not CXM!) - We saw this term establish itself 3 or so years ago, however the concept has been around for more like 15. We learned about the term Digital Disruption and we will see it used ad nauseam in the coming year. This year it becomes increasingly important to embrace or use digital information to improve the human interactions with the customer. For instance sharing the digital marketing stream that landed the customer on the website and to the hotel booking, with the check in clerk would ad a whole new level of personalization to that first face to face connection.
- Commerce - We will see a closer intersection between commerce and content. This will be most apparent in the form of company acquisitions such as when Sitecore gobbled up CommerceServer and SAP's purchase of Hybris. Scott predicts that there will be a continuing run on commerce startups as well as marquee established companies.
- The Importance of Service Providers - Meaning that with the growing complexity of CEM and all the dependent technologies, the role of the digital agency or the integrating company becomes increasingly critical to the success of the enterprise project.
- WCM/CMS Mindset Will Die - Vendors and integrators who continue to pursue the CMS/WCM ideology will find themselves out of work. The growing complexity of CXM development will force agencies and integrators to re-educate themselves in order to keep up with what the cutting edge software providers are delivering in their platforms. Integrators in 2014 must learn to take advantage of the contemporary tools at their disposal to further their integration solutions.
- Onset of Intelligent Publishing - If I am surmising appropriately, Scott's point here is that the evolution of customer engagement will move towards more integration of analytics and metrics in order to produce that right time, right place, right location and right device, Utopia. We have so many tools at our disposal that vendors and integrators will start to be able to develop very intelligent marketing automation strategies. Big data and CRM platforms will help feed this innovation creating an era of truly meaningful and smart content publishing.
As always, thank you for reading and helping to make this episode one of the most enjoyable ever!
Jade Carter
Jade is a content writer for CMS-Connected, facilitating the needs of the company blog. Bringing 10 years of Search and Digital Marketing to the table, he strives to build informative, relevant and fun editorial posts for the blog feed. Jade is an ultra distance (26.2 miles+) trail runner and lives to run trails in and around his home town of Victoria, BC.