0 Manticore Technology Sees Expertise as Key to Success as a Demand Generation Vendor

Summary: Manticore Technology released some modest enhancements to its demand generation platform today. The company takes a conservative approach to marketing automation, stressing the importance of process over flashy software. I’m not sure this will be enough to thrive as the market develops, but customers will benefit regardless.

Manticore Technology today released the latest version of its marketing automation system. Changes include a drag-and-drop design tool (similar to Microsoft Powerpoint); integration of opportunities and custom objects from Salesforce.com; better reporting on Web site visitors; and, real time sales alerts on Web activity.

Each of these makes Manticore a bit more useful but none breaks new ground for the industry. So rather than review them in depth (you can read Manticore’s press release for details), I’ll look at Manticore’s broader business approach as outlined by Marketing Vice President Christopher Doran.

First some background. Manticore launched its B2B marketing automation system in 2003, making it one of the older vendors in the industry. With a $2,000 per month starting price and a solid mix of features, it sits squarely in the middle of the market. The firm has grown steadily but slowly, reaching just under 125 active clients. These include a few very large firms but mostly mid-size businesses and divisions of larger companies. Unlike faster-growing competitors, Manticore has been largely self-funded.

In a stable industry, this would be a comfortably conservative position. But the marketing automation space is changing rapidly. A mid-tier company which is neither growing quickly nor dominating a particular niche could easily be left behind. At least, that's my opinion.

Manticore doesn’t see it this way. According to Doran, the company has found that the real key to success is guiding clients through successful execution of demand generation programs. Manticore wants clients to understand that demand generation is a business process. It positions itself as a "trusted advisor" that sells based on its expertise, not on technology.

Part of this approach is to give clients a methodology. Manticore offers a straightforward one: define the stages in your marketing funnel; benchmark performance at each stage and identify bottlenecks; create transitional content to move prospects into new stages; define nurture programs to reduce bottlenecks; execute the programs; measure the results and compare them with your goals. The product supports this methodology but does not insist on it.

Doran sees Manticore's customer support group as playing a key role in delivering its expertise. Support staff are trained to help clients address their business issues. This fills a key gap between buying the software and hiring an actual marketing consultant. Manticore relies on business partners for such consulting services.

Of course, Manticore recognizes that it cannot succeed unless the product itself remains competitive. As the latest round of enhancements illustrates, Manticore remains focused on the core demand generation features of email, landing pages, lead nurturing and sales integration. The company is avoiding extensive investments in “inbound marketing” technologies such as search engine optimization and paid search advertising. Nor will it expand into marketing resource management features for planning and budgeting. Doran did say he expected to add some social media features and deeper reporting. And the company will continue to stress its traditional message of ease of use – although at this point, most other demand generation vendors make a similar claim.

I remain skeptical about Manticore's approach. It's true that process is more important than technology and that services to new users were the key to success in earlier marketing automation generations. But today there are plenty of consultants and agencies to provide that support, so it's probably not necessary for vendors to do it themselves. As a practical matter, I think most buyers will prefer systems with a broader scope, flashier presentation and more aggressive marketing. But so long as Manticore and similar firms remain financially sound, they can sell to the minority of buyers who understand the value of expert service. Perhaps that's all Manticore really needs.

0 Marketing Automation Vendor Consolidation: Lessons from History

Summary: consolidation isn't new among marketing software vendors. When campaign management systems consolidated in the late 1990's and early 2000's, most were bought by enterprise software companies. The pattern will likely repeat itself.

As I wrote in my June 30 post on consolidation among marketing automation vendors, I expect the number of competitors to shrink fairly quickly as new buyers concentrate their purchases among a handful of leading vendors. This is a natural result of a maturing market, as technology-oriented pioneers are replaced by buyers less likely to research their options in depth.

But what, exactly, will the consolidation look like? Will weaker marketing automation vendors merge with each other to establish a larger market presence? Will they merge with complementary firms to offer a broader range of capabilities? Will they specialize in particular industries to establish a small but profitable niche? Or will they simply be crushed as giants from related industries introduce their own products?

Let’s look at a similar consolidation about ten years ago, among the original marketing automation vendors.* These were campaign management systems including Exchange Applications, Recognition Systems/Protagona, Prime Response, Intrinsic, Unica, Aprimo, Decision Software TopDog/MarketWide, Alterian and SmartFocus.

The pattern is quite clear. A handful of vendors managed to survive as independent firms. The big winner has been Unica, which competes successfully among high-end buyers. Decision Software has remained a small company while Aprimo is most successful in B2B marketing resource management. Alterian and SmartFocus are also still independent, but are sold largely via marketing service agencies.

The rest of the competitors, including the original market leaders, were nearly all purchased as line extensions by much larger firms. Exchange Applications went to Amdocs, Prime Response went to Chordiant (itself recently purchased by Pegasystems), Protagona was purchased by DoubleClick (now part of Google), Ceres ended up with Teradata, Intrinsic was bought by SAS, Epiphany became part of Infor, Paragren was bought by Siebel (now Oracle). Other, less successful vendors simply vanished. There were no mergers of equals and no one thrived as a specialist in a particular industry. Although Unica, Alterian and SmartFocus have purchased complementary products, these were extensions around the campaign management core.

Although the world has certainly changed since the late 1990’s, I see no reason to expect a different pattern among demand generation vendors. A few might survive as independents serving the most sophisticated clients. Eloqua and Silverpop are the obvious candidates. Of the remainder, the stronger firms will probably be purchased by companies seeking enter the demand generation space, and the weaker firms will quietly go out of business or be purchased for their client lists.

The more interesting question is who will be the buyers. The obvious candidates are CRM vendors. Of course, Oracle has already made its move by purchasing Market2Lead's intellectual assets. Salesforce.com is the big question and no one would be surprised to see them make an acquisition. Enterprise software vendors like SAP and Infor are also likely buyers. Microsoft is another possibility, although its Dynamics CRM is sold mostly to smaller businesses than the typical marketing automation system. Speaking of small business suppliers, Google and Intuit are long-shot contenders.

Email marketing is another obvious adjacent space. Again, there was already one transaction: Silverpop/Vtrenz in 2007. The potential margins from marketing automation probably look relatively attractive to email vendors. The problem here may be that the independent email service providers (ExactTarget, Responsys, Vertical Response) are relatively small companies themselves, so it might be hard for them to make a substantial investment. On the other hand, as the consolidation proceeds, small marketing automation companies may get pretty cheap.

Finally, we come to Web marketing companies. These include content management systems (Autonomy Interwoven, EMC Documentum, OpenText, etc.) and Web analytics (Adobe Omniture, IBM Coremetrics, WebTrends). Note that many of these are already part of larger suites whose owners could easily afford a marketing automation acquisition. A couple of smaller Web content management firms (Marqui, SiteCore) have already moved towards marketing automation. One challenge faced by the smaller Web marketing companies is that their customers (Web site managers and analysts) are generally not the buyers for marketing automation. Even “inbound marketing” (search engine optimization, keyword advertising, Web display ads) is often done by someone other than the marketing automation user. This is less of an issue for larger firms, who have relationships throughout their clients’ organizations.

Incidentally, not everyone agrees that smaller marketing automation vendors must vanish. I had a conversation today with one vendor who argued that success still depends mostly on helping new users get value from their systems. In this view, small vendors can succeed by providing excellent service and support, as well as by linking with marketing agencies and consultancies. This could certainly be a niche – remember that Alterian and SmartFocus survived by working through service providers. Still, I ultimately expect that most mid- and large-size firms will purchase marketing automation as part of a larger software suite, and thus that independent marketing automation vendors will find it increasingly tough to survive.

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*Actually, there was a previous class of “database marketing” systems including Customer Insight Company, OKRA Marketing, Harte-Hanks P/CIS, Max$ell and RTMS. These used proprietary, non-SQL database engines. Most were purchased by larger companies and then discarded when adequate systems using standard SQL databases became available. Alterian and SmartFocus, both descended from Brann Viper, still survive.

0 HiveFire Curata Cuts the Work in Content Aggregation

Summary: HiveFire Curata makes it easy to assemble and republish content on specialized topics, attracting visitors to your company’s Web site.

Here’s an irony for you: the world is awash with content, but marketers struggle to find enough of it. It’s like a sailor dying of thirst.

Of course, sailors really do die of thirst. It happens when they’re surrounded by salt water they can’t drink. Marketers have the same problem: they can’t use most of the content that’s available.

HiveFire Curata aims to solve this problem by making it easier for marketers to extract usable content from the surrounding ocean. In fact, Curata provides a complete system to not just locate the right content but also to organize and present it to the marketer’s target audience. The goal is to make finding and repurposing existing content easier than creating new content on your own.

More specifically, Curata lets marketers build Web sites that republish content on selected topics, such as news of a particular industry. This attracts the marketer’s target customers and positions the marketer’s firm as an authority in the field. Once the audience is assembled, the site can also deliver the company’s own content and advertisements.

The trick to making this work is efficiency. You don’t need a special tool to scan the Internet: a simple Google Alert or Twitter search will do that for free. But you’d still need to read each article, tag it with keywords, and post it to your site. The work adds up so quickly that most marketers can’t afford to do it.

Curata reduces this effort by using natural language processing to automatically identify, classify and tag potential articles. It then presents them for manual review before being posted to a Curata Web site, which automatically adds them to appropriate indexes for future reference. The result is an organized archive that offers real value to someone interested in a topic. Because the search and tagging are highly automated, Curata says a typical client processes 40 to 80 articles each day in about 20 minutes.

Setting up a Curata site requires little technical skill. Users choose a format and then use a page designer to place widgets for articles, blog posts, lists of articles by category, author or entity, news streams, site search, media galleries, subscriptions and user registration. They also define the sources and search terms and exclusions the system will use to find content. Sources can include social media, news feeds, patent registrations and RSS subscriptions. Content on the Web site can also be published through RSS subscriptions, email newsletters, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Because the system is hosted by Curata, it can be set up and maintained without help from the corporate IT department or Web team. This is a critical advantage for many marketers who lack priority access to those resources.

This is all good, and many companies should find Curata well worth the $1,500 per month ($1,200 with an annual contract). But I did see a number of features I’d like added. These include:

- screening the selected articles. Currently the system presents the articles in the sequence they are found, without identifying redundancies or even removing exact duplicates. Intelligent screening could remove some articles and present similar ones together, saving considerable labor when large volumes are involved.

- ranking the selected articles. The system currently reports the traffic attracted by each article, but it doesn’t use this to predict the popularity of new articles. Such predictions should be well within the capabilities of the natural language engine. Nor does the system rank articles on other criteria such as the authority of the source. Ranking could let editors review the most important articles first and discard the others once they had reached their daily quota.

- more subscriber information. Visitors register with the system to post comments and subscribe the email newsletters. But the profile cannot be extended beyond name, password and email address. This is missing an obvious opportunity to capture more information about potential leads.

- subscriber behavior tracking. Curata doesn’t report on the behavior of individual visitors, such as which items they view or how often they visit. This is another bundle of information that marketers and salespeople could use to understand visitor interests and to identify hot prospects.

HiveFire was open to these ideas when we discussed them, so I’d expect to see some appear in the future. But it's worth noting that Curata already has about 40 clients, who are presumably satisfied enough the existing features to pay for them. So even in its current state, Curata is worth a look if you want to sail the seas of content aggregation.

0 LoopFuse Offers Free Marketing Automation System: Another Step Towards Industry Consolidation

Summary: LoopFuse has launched a free entry-level version of its marketing automation system. It's one example of how vendors are now competing to attract new users. Only the winners will survive industry consolidation, which may be here sooner than you think.

LoopFuse today promised to “transform” the marketing automation industry by offering a free version of its system. Although LoopFuse and others already provide free trials, this is indeed different: while most free trials expire after 30 days and often have limited functionality, LoopFuse’s FreeView can be used for as long as you like and provides pretty much the same features as the paid version of the system. The critical constraint is that volume is limited to 2,500 prospect names, 5,000 emails and 100,000 page views per month. In practice, this means that only very small companies will actually be able to use the free system as their primary long-term marketing system.

LoopFuse knows that, of course. When they briefed me last week, they said the main purpose of the new system is really to entice trial among companies just starting with marketing automation. They’ll make their money when users see the value they gain and pay for higher volumes and add-on features.

Personally, I’d argue that the really significant news out of LoopFuse is their newly tiered pricing structure. The entry point of $350 per month (for up to 10,000 prospects with unlimited emails and page views) is much lower than the $1,000 to $2,000 starting price of most full-function marketing automation systems. Prices at higher volumes are also much lower than competitors. This will put substantial pricing pressure on vendors who, in many cases, are already struggling to reach sustainable margins.

Here’s where the free system comes back into play. To make a free product viable, LoopFuse needed to engineer as much cost as possible out of the entire client life cycle. This means it had to be possible for clients to purchase and configure the system, learn how to use it and resolve support issues with next to no involvement by LoopFuse staff. Once this was accomplished, LoopFuse was in a position to charge lower fees to its paying clients as well. Other vendors – notably Pardot – have followed a similar cost-removal strategy. But LoopFuse may have been more focused than anyone else.

This doesn’t mean that LoopFuse’s success is guaranteed. Other vendors have similar price points for the small business market (see my list of demand generation vendors) although I suspect their internal costs are higher.

More important, price is just one factor in picking a system. Features, ease of use, and support from the vendor and business partners are usually (and rightly) the main considerations. The free product should increase the number of companies that try LoopFuse first, which will gain it paying customers down the road. But I think that most buyers will recognize that they are likely to stay with their first system and conduct a careful evaluation before they start.

For evidence that a free entry-level product does not automatically drive out higher priced systems, consider the hosted CRM market. Salesforce.com easily dominates despite the presence of surprisingly capable free products like ZohoCRM and FreeCRM .

Whatever the result for LoopFuse, the new offering is part of a larger pattern within the industry. Marketing automation (more precisely, B2B marketing automation) has now passed beyond the pioneer stage where fundamentally different approaches compete for acceptance. At this point, we all pretty much know what a marketing automation system does and, truth be told, the major systems are functionally quite similar.

Competition now shifts from building a technically better system to surviving the inevitable industry consolidation. This requires finding ways to attract masses of new customers as they enter the market.

LoopFuse’s price-driven approach is one such strategy. But many vendors have recently taken others:

- Eloqua, Silverpop, True Influence and at least one other vendor I can’t name are planning new interfaces that they believe will substantially improve ease of use, which they see as the critical barrier blocking many potential buyers. I’m skeptical that truly radical improvements are possible but am certainly eager to see what they come up with.

- LeadLife has embedded best practice hints throughout its system, another way to support adoption by users who lack marketing automation knowledge.

- Infusionsoft has repositioned itself as “email 2.0” rather than marketing automation. They believe this makes it easier for their target customers (under 25 employees) to see them as the next logical step beyond standard email.

- Genius.com added a new Demand Generation edition that falls between its basic Email Marketing and full-blown Marketing Automation products. This is another way of easing the transition from basic email marketing.

- LeadForce1 launched a solution that uses advanced text analysis to measure user intent, and thus provide much better guidance to salespeople than conventional behavioral analysis. Although their approach is based on superior technology, it's still a way to attract customers by offering radically greater value than competitors.

- Marketo now calls itself a “the revenue cycle management company”, giving equal public weight to lead management, sales insight and analytics. They still haven’t briefed me on this or their features to support large enterprises, but they seem to be seeking larger, more sophisticated clients who will presumably provide higher profit margins. Given how many other vendors are targeting small businesses, this certainly makes sense. But Marketo will also find itself competing with established marketing automation vendors like Aprimo, Neolane and Unica. who are entering this market from a different direction. It will also be competing with Eloqua, Silverpop and, perhaps most dangerously, the Market2Lead technology recently purchased by Oracle.

The Market2Lead-Oracle deal raises the other major question facing marketing automation vendors: what role CRM vendors will play? In addition to Oracle, CDC Software (owner of Pivotal CRM and MarketFirst) recently invested in Marketbright.

Of course, the really big question is whether Salesforce.com will make a similar move. There have been off-and-on rumors along those lines for months, followed by stout (if not necessarily credible) denial from Salesforce.com that it has any interest in that direction. I’ve tended to take them at their word, but Oracle and Salesforce.com are blood rivals, so Oracle’s move could easily prompt a Salesforce.com reaction.

Oddly enough, no seems to consider whether Microsoft will enter the game. That's surely a possibility, and would move towards a certainty if its two big on-demand CRM rivals both added marketing automation products. We might even see Google and Intuit participate: both already sell to small business marketers.

My fundamental conclusion is that the B2B marketing automation industry is about to enter the long-predicted stage of vendor consolidation, and that this will move quite quickly. The survivors will serve particular market segments: primarily small vs. large businesses, plus possibly some vertical industry specialization. The window for new entrants is rapidly closing, so any new player will need a major differentiator that creates a clear advantage and distinct identity.

0 Saffron Technology Organizes Data into Memories

Summary: Saffron Technology provides an analytical database that explores relationships among entities and their attributes. It can explore networks, find similarities and guide decisions. Saffron is considerably more flexible than standard semantic engines.

As I was preparing my June 3 review of link analysis vendor Centrifuge Systems, Centrifuge introduced me to their business partners at Saffron Technology. This is an interesting product in its own right.

Saffron describes itself as an “associative memory base product,” a phrase that definitely takes some explaining. In simplest terms, Saffron organizes information into sets of three or four related items.

More specifically, it stores pairs of items in the context of an entity. For example, “Jack-climb-hill”, “Jack-plant-beanstalk”, “Jack-jump-candlestick” and “Jack-build-house” are all part of what Saffron calls Jack’s “memory”.

Related sets can be grouped into "matrices" that share another item. Thus, one matrix could contain “Jack-Jill-up-hill”, “Jack-Jill-fetch-water”, “Jack-Jill-fall-down” and “Jack-Jill-break-crown”, while “Jack-beanstalk-plant-seed”, “Jack-beanstalk-climb-up”, “Jack-beanstalk-steal-harp” and “Jack-beanstalk-kill-giant” form a separate matrix.

Saffron physically prejoins the data in Jack’s memory so it can be accessed easily and shared elements can be stored only once. Jill’s memory is stored separately from Jack’s even though some sets contain the same data. Jill’s memory may also contain sets without Jack (but let’s not tell him). Depending on how the system is configured, the hill could have its own memory as well.

Saffon’s approach lets it handle the subject-verb-object triples used in semantic analysis. But unlike standard semantic triplestores, Saffron is not limited to this structure. Sets could contain all nouns (Jack-Jill-hill), which can be useful even if the precise relationship among the items isn’t known. Or one of the items could be a time dimension. The system also counts of how often each item pair occurs in the source data, supporting statistical as well as semantic analysis.

These features make Saffron substantially more flexible than a semantic system. They also let it work with many more data sources, since reliable subject-verb-object relationships are often unavailable.

This may sound pretty dry, but Saffron's actual applications have been cloak-and-dagger stuff like looking for terrorists and finding roadside bombs. Remember that I was introduced to Saffron by Centrifuge, whose link analysis system is used primarily for law enforcement and security investigations. Saffron’s approach works particularly well with the Centrifuge front-end.

The fundamental advantage of Saffron is that associations among different items are directly accessible for analysis. This lets the system support different types of queries including:

- connections (identifying relationships among items)
- networks (showing how entities connect with each other)
- analogies (finding entities with similar connections)
- classifications (placing similar entities into groups)
- trends (reporting how connections change over time)
- episodes (finding patterns that repeat over time)

Real-world applications extend beyond link analysis to classifications and decisions. For example, the system can select medical treatments for a particular patient or assign suspended loans to different collection processes. These are complex processes. The system must identify entities with similar characteristics, identify the treatments and outcomes for those entities and estimate the likely outcomes of applying different treatments to the current entity.

Saffron's advantage with such applications is that the characteristics, treatments and outcomes are all just items in the data store. There's no need to load them differently or build a causal model of how they interact. In other words, the system needs no inherent assumptions about how the world works. This lets it effortlessly incorporate new data, uncover hidden relationships and react to new situations.

Well, “effortlessly” is a bit of an exaggeration. Saffron does some pretty complicated calculations to decide which entities are most similar and which treatments have the highest expected value (i.e., outcome value x outcome probability). Users have to review results and make judgments to tune the system. But this is still much less work than conventional statistical modeling or rule-based systems.

Saffron’s technology lets users define the types of data to will store, load data into the system, and execute API calls for the different types of analysis (connections, networks, analogies, etc.) Saffron generally relies on external systems to identify entities within source data, classify them into the specified categories, and report their associations to Saffron. Saffron can load structured data as well.

Saffron runs on a 64 bit “soft appliance” that distributes its data over clusters of server drives. The company claims world-record performance at ingesting, storing and accessing triplestore data, as well as compression to about 20 bytes per triple compared with 50 to 150 bytes per triple in other triplestore systems.

But let’s not get too carried away: Saffron works with large but not gigantic databases. Customer systems have been in the one-terabyte range.

Pricing for Saffron is starts at $125,000 per server, where a standard server is an eight core machine with 16 gigabytes of RAM per core. A trial version of the system is also available on the Amazon EC2 cloud as SaffronSierra.