Every week, we recount some of the best buzz around CRM and data integration. We’ll review our favorite articles and share the most pressing findings or key takeaways from each.
Gartner Predicts CRM Will Be a $36B Market by 2017
By: Louis Columbus (@LouisColumbus)
Gartner’s most recent forecast puts the value of CRM at $36B by 2017, a prediction almost $16B higher than their Q1 forecast. This means CRM will overtake ERP to hold the highest market value of all business systems. Louis provides pertinent takeaways from this prediction, including the increasing rate at which CRM is growing (15.1% CAGR) compared with the growth of ERP (7% CAGR). Other business systems will continue to show significant growth, including data integration/quality tools, which will hit $6B by 2017 at a CAGR of 10.3% to help connect and increase the value of the rest of enterprise software.
Integrating the Enterprise’s Old and New Worlds
By: Jeff Kaplan (@thinkstrategies)
With the pace of technology and the move to the cloud increasing, enterprises face a challenge – how to integrate new cloud-based systems with existing applications and data sources? And thus far the challenge remains, as only 16% of businesses have achieved full integration among these systems today. Jeff details key findings from Scribe’s State of Data Integration survey, including barriers to integration such as the fact that 48% of survey participants still rely on custom code for their integration needs, while only 13% of companies have successfully integrated CRM and ERP systems. The silver lining is that integration is easier today than ever before, and cloud-based integration solutions will continue to make implementing integration easier, even as the multi-point integrations needed in today’s business grow increasingly complex.
Marketing in the Digital Age: 5 Tips for CMOs
By: Vala Afshar (@ValaAfshar)
Vala’s piece brings tips from Michael Fauscette, Group Vice President at IDC’s Software Solutions group, to the rest of us. In this digital age, top CMOs must partner with the CIO and position themselves as influencers to take advantage of the 60% of the decision-making process that happens before customers contact a business. On the technically-oriented side, CMOs should take advantage of customer communications platforms to build a framework for the customer experience, look to bigger vendors for a complete solution and integrate enterprise social networks to connect customers and partners. This is all sound advice, with the caveat that businesses with access to easy integration solutions can bypass vendor lock-in from the larger players to take advantage of best-of-breed solutions where desired.
Will Cloud-to-On-Premise Integration Problems Bring Down the Economy?
By: Loraine Lawson (@LoraineLawson)
In a recap of Natalie Kilner Hughes’ recent post, Loraine explores the importance of integrating on-premise and cloud solutions in keeping our economy running. Integration and cloud migration challenges have kept technology companies from implementing necessary upgrades, causing them to lose “billions of dollars in market capitalization.” Enterprise Service Buses serve as one potential solution to this challenge, as well as more specific integration offerings designed to eliminate the need for coding and allowing for easy integration between new cloud offerings and legacy systems. Whatever the solution, as Loraine explains, it “must integrate enterprise business rules with cloud software and mobile devices.”
Why CMOs and CIOs are Sharing the IT Load
By: Kevin Fitchard (@kfitchard)
Going with the trend of converging marketing and IT goals and spending, at GigaOm Structure Clorox CIO Ralph Loura explained why the CMO and CIO must collaborate to succeed. With splintering channels and pervasive technology, marketing needs to understand and collaborate with IT to reach the digital consumer. CMOs will control more of the technology budget moving forward, but this doesn’t make IT obsolete – rather, it necessitates a close partnership between the two departments to ensure effective deployment and achievement of strategic results.
We hope you had a great week! We’ll see you again soon with a roundup of all the movers and shakers in CRM and data integration news.
