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None of them expect to move to a single-vendor solution at their core. At least not in the next 2-3 years. However, most of them are looking to reduce the number of vendors in the foundation layer of their marketing technology stack — software such as CRM, CMS, MAP — to achieve greater standardization across the enterprise for core marketing data and services. But many expressed great wariness at becoming reliant on a single vendor.

Almost all of them expect the ecosystem of more specialized marketing software at the layer above that foundation to remain rich and diverse. Again, the green marks relative to the red marks show that they expect greater standardization in those choices compared to the “chaos” of today — but they still expect 20-40 different vendors across the enterprise for an ever-evolving range of specific capabilities in the future.

The SaaS model is already widely adopted in enterprise marketing — and most expect it to become more prevalent across their stack. While there are lingering concerns of the cloud from “fortress IT,” most have come to accept that they can get better economics and flexibility in the cloud with equal or better security. (Most of the major security breaches that consumer brands have suffered have been with on-premise infrastructure.)

While there will be less purely custom-built marketing software, all of them still expect significant customization in their stacks. Most expect to customize and extend more off-the-shelf products, rather than building systems entirely from scratch. They’re expecting to leverage APIs almost like “private ISVs.” The most valuable kind of customization to them is that which helps differentiate their customer experience. Such customization is likely to be one of the key responsibilities for marketing technologists.

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