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The black fly in the chardonnay, however, is that narrative is disconnected from reality.

 

Marketing and technology are simply changing too rapidly. The scope of marketing is expanding exponentially by the day, as its responsibilities grow from customer communications to customer experiences, spanning the entire customer lifecycle.

 

To pretend that a single software vendor will master all of that — and be able to keep up with all the innovations blossoming in a thousand directions across the industry — and somehow make that all stable and useable is, in my humble opinion, a fantasy.

 

To be fair, many of the major marketing systems out there have laid the technical groundwork for this. They’ve provided APIs for third-parties to connect their applications. They’ve established partnership programs for those third-parties. You can probably find a list of those partners somewhere on their website — although for some vendors, it’s actually quite hard to find them.

 

Instead, [Marketo is] acknowledging that these other marketing experience software companies bring tremendous value to the table. They’ve committed to make it easier for marketers to pick and choose from that incredible cornucopia of marketing technology solutions and seamlessly integrate them into their environment. And they’ve committed to give third-parties deep access into their platform’s data repositories, workflow capabilities, analytics, and more.

 

At the risk of overplaying my hand, I’ll make two more predictions:

First, marketing software developers will embrace Marketo in return. An open platform with large adoption provides a terrific vehicle for other marketing software vendors to accelerate their adoption by becoming plug-and-play solutions on top of it.

Second, other major cloud/hub/suite vendors will tack to platform strategies too. This will be easier for some than others — not so much due to technical barriers, but due to barriers of politics and pride. But most will overcome those barriers because they cannot cede victory in the coming “marketing platform wars” to Marketo by sitting this out. They need to win third-party/ISV share. They cannot afford to become Blackberry while their competitors become iOS and Android.

 

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