There are numerous marketing solutions in the market, from full-suite CRM vendors and specialized vendors like Aprimo, Epiphany (from Infor), Omniture, Silverpop or Unica. Now Alterian is jockeying for a leadership position in a crowded but still fragmented market.
Alterian is a database marketing and analytics firm with roots in the UK, dating back to 1997. The company’s main go-to-market strategy has been through Marketing Service Providers (MSPs) like Experian and TargetBase—because Alterian provides tools to manage and execute online and offline marketing campaigns.
On such partner is Merkle, a database marketing firm. If you’ve received promos from Capitol One, Geico, Walt Disney or The Limited, there’s a good chance that Merkle is the company running those campaigns, using Alterian’s technology “under the hood.”
Merkle CTO Christian Wright told me that he likes Alterian because of its partner-centric model, which creates a closer relationship than other vendors that mainly sell direct to corporations. Alterian’s focus on simplicity/ease-of-use also helps, and “price/performance is also a factor,” he says.
McNamara says that what’s driving multi-channel marketing demand is the attention given to the customer experience. To deliver a great experience, however, he says that “marketing must be analytically led” and that tools much be much easier to use. According to a recent survey, he says that 70% of marketers use more than 3 tools on a daily basis.
To that end, Alterian has not tried to match every possible feature that competitors offer. Instead, taking a page out of the SaaS game plan that has worked for Salesforce.com and others in the past decade, Alterian provides most of the features that users want, but at a lower TCO and with less complexity.
These days, when companies are pinching pennies and simplifying operations in a weak economy, that approach seems to be working.
Alterian’s strategy has paid off with high growth in the UK and, more recently, the US market. McNamara says that the company’s revenue grew 60% in North America the last 2 years running, which put Alterian “into a position to do the acquisition of Mediasurface,” which completed in July this year.
Mediasurface’s web content management gives Alterian new capabilities to provide a multi-channel marketing platform to MSPs. But, Mediasurface was primarily sold direct to companies, so Alterian now has to manage a more complicated direct/indirect sales model.
Alterian has a strong position with MSPs, and I’m sure that they’ll do everything possible to keep those relationships in good shape. But, to become an industry leader, I believe that Alterian will also need to have a successful direct sales model, both in Europe and the US.
It should be interesting to watch to see if, and how, Alterian vies for industry leadership in multi-channel marketing solutions. Expect more M&A activity in this fragmented space in the next couple of years.
