On May 2, designated as International Martech Day, Scott Brinker unveiled the latest edition of his marketing technology landscape. From 9,932 last year, the total number of solutions in the landscape has grown to 11,038. This represents something like a 7,000% growth in the space over the last 12 years.

One new feature launched alongside the landscape is the Marketing Technology Capability Heatmap. It reveals the most searched-for capabilities, with personalization at number one, and identifies the categories that offer them.

Presenting at Best of Breed Marketing Summit alongside Marketing Tribe founder Frans Riemersma, Brinker, VP platform eco-system at HubSpot, said: “On average, across companies of all sizes, you still have around 291 SaaS subscriptions. Even while there is consolidation of the industry in the economic environment of today, a motivation to rationalize stacks, we still see people using this very wide variety of tools.”

Dig deeper: Why marketers are replacing foundational martech

Other key trends. Among the trends identified within the new landscape, Brinker and Riemersma highlighted the following:

• Two-way data flows between data warehouses and front-line solutions like CDPs.
• Composability emerging in a number of categories including DXPs, commerce and CDPs.
• “AI as your co-pilot is real,” said Brinker; and it’s going to change the relationship between buyers and sellers because buyers will have AI too.
• Generative AI will extend the no-code revolution beyond marketing ops and power users to any marketing or business user.

Why we care. Everyone who knows marketing technology knows the marketing technology landscape. It’s an evolving but iconic image. It’s such a crowded graphic, however, that it simply became hard to read. This is why it’s so valuable that it has become, essentially, interactive. Registered users can explore the actual content of the landscape rather than just gaze on it in wonder.

The landscape is available at Chief Martec and can be sorted, filtered and queried at martechmap.com.

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SAP is also highlighting its partnership program for Commerce Cloud, including Contentful for content creation, Coveo for AI-driven product recommendations and Akeneo for PIM and product experience management.

Why we care. This is a new stage on the SAP commerce journey, which began essentially with the acquisition of ecommerce vendor Hybris ten years ago. Hybris became SAP Hybris and then evolved into SAP Commerce Cloud, part of a broader CX suite.

The new initiative reflects a growing trend towards composability in the digital experience and commerce space as businesses with different levels of digital maturity, different products and services, and an ever-diversifying range of channels in which to meet customers, are seeing the limitations of being locked into traditional, all-in-one solutions.

A federated approach to offering services, combined with large partner networks, is bringing much greater flexibility to commerce offerings.

Dig deeper: Sitecore adds new products to its composable DXP

All-in-one versus composable. Comprehensive buy-in to Commerce Cloud secures a wide range of services including order management, PIM, content management, personalization and engagement tools. Not every business needs all of these services from their commerce provider of choice — or not all of them at the same time.

By choosing among SAP and partner applications served on the Commerce Cloud platform, SAP customers can create their own agile, highly customized commerce solutions.

SAP is also flagging these announcements as reaffirming its commitment to the digital commerce and CX categories.

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Dig deeper: What is a digital experience platform or DXP and is it the future of content management?

What is MACH?

MACH (microservices, API-first, cloud-native and headless) is a modern approach to digital experience management that allows for greater flexibility, scalability and speed. MACH-based DXPs offer several benefits to marketing organizations looking to work more effectively and efficiently.

Misalignment in MACH-based products

This may shock you, but not all products marketed as MACH DXPs are created equal. MACH has become a highly sought-after concept in the industry. Some vendors may see the label as a way to differentiate themselves and attract customers looking for solutions that embody the principles of MACH. (The same goes for SaaS, but that’s a topic for another article.)

Not all products marketed as MACH are fully compatible with the architecture or even aligned with its principles. This misalignment creates customer confusion and mistrust and can ultimately harm the vendor’s reputation and credibility.

Dig deeper: Digital experience platforms: 4 building blocks to success

Benefits of MACH-based DXPs

One of the key advantages of MACH-based DXPs is the ability to break down complex systems into smaller, independent components that can be managed and updated separately. This allows for faster and more efficient development, testing and deployment of new features and functionality.

Another key advantage is the API-first approach, which enables marketers to easily access and use data from various sources to deliver personalized experiences. This helps organizations keep pace with constantly evolving consumer expectations.

Cloud-native technology, built specifically for deployment — wait for it — in the cloud, provides the scalability and reliability required to support complex digital experiences at scale. The headless approach allows for greater flexibility and independence in the front-end development process, enabling marketing teams to move faster and deliver new experiences to the market more quickly.

Overall, MACH-based DXPs help marketing organizations achieve faster time to value and time to market, enabling them to keep pace with a consumer who moves faster than the brand. This approach to digital experience delivery helps organizations stay ahead of the curve, deliver better experiences and achieve better business results.

Dig deeper: Reinventing the digital experience platform

Reducing risk and increasing success

To reduce risk, avoid misleading marketing claims and improve your chances of success in adopting a MACH-based DXP, here are key considerations:

• Thoroughly research and assess potential vendors to ensure their offering aligns with the organization’s specific needs and the principles of MACH architecture.
• Look for vendors that clearly understand the MACH architecture and its benefits and a solid track record of successful MACH-based DXP implementations.
• Consider the vendor’s expertise, commitment to supporting the MACH architecture and experience working with other organizations in similar industries or marketing challenges.
• Ask for references and case studies from organizations that have successfully adopted a MACH-based DXP to better understand the vendor’s capabilities and track record.
• Pay close attention to the vendor’s support and training offerings to ensure they have the resources to help your organization adopt a MACH-based DXP.

Separating marketing hype from reality

MACH architecture is a modern approach to digital experience management that offers benefits like flexibility, scalability and speed. Not all products marketed as MACH DXPs are aligned with the principles of MACH, leading to confusion and mistrust among customers. 

To ensure success and reduce risk, it is essential to thoroughly research potential vendors and assess their alignment with the organization’s needs and the principles of MACH architecture. Look for a vendor with a solid track record, expertise and commitment to supporting the MACH architecture and consider their support and training offerings.

The post The truth behind MACH-based DXPs: Benefits, risks and key considerations appeared first on MarTech.

Your organization should start with a comprehensive self-assessment of its business needs, staff capabilities, management support and financial resources.

The following questions should help your team decide whether purchasing a DXP is the right call:

Explore platform capabilities from vendors like Sitecore, Optimizely, Pantheon, WordPressVIP and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on digital experience platforms.

Click here to download!

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The future is composable

Although the overt theme of Symposium was “Meet every moment” — highlighting the challenge of engaging customers with immediately relevant content at each moment of their journey — the constantly reinforced message from a technology perspective was composability.

While some vendors feel the tension between trying to sell a complete platform to customers and allowing them to pick the components they need to complete their stacks, Sitecore is evidently all-in on composability; the proposition, as Chief Product Officer Dave O’Flanagan put it, that customers should be allowed to assemble “a stack as unique as their business.” This may mean one or 10 Sitecore products in the DX stack, but connections to as many other third-party vendor products as needed.

“We are on a mission to redefine this category with our composable DXP,” said O’Flanagan. Sitecore thus boasts, not just an end-to-end suite of DXP components, but an end-to-end suite of composable products — and it claims to be the only vendor in its space with that specific offering.

This does not mean, however, that Sitecore does not want to be the center, hub, or indeed core of the stack. Sitecore Cloud Portal offers an opportunity for administrators to manage the stack — including permissions, product access and payments. What’s notable is that the Portal allows the management not just of the Sitecore modules, but also third-party products in the stack (a demo slide showed Salesforce and Marketo, for example).

Introducing three new products

Sitecore announced the addition of three new modules to its product portfolio: Sitecore Search, Sitecore Connect and Content Hub One.

Sitecore Search

This is an AI-driven and personalized search engine, capable of searching content beyond just text. It will predict relevant search results (using autocomplete) and promote content based either on the customer’s behavior and search needs or business objectives.

As a plug-and-play solution it can be deployed on a website within hours. Marketing teams, said O’Flanagan, can manage the search experience without technical knowledge. On the composability theme again Search can be deployed to index any CMS, Sitecore or not.

Sitecore Connect

Emphasizing the composability of its product offering, Sitecore Connect, developed in partnership with Workato, is aimed at allowing brands to integrate Sitecore products with existing solutions within the martech stack. It promises a low/no code drag-and-drop UI. It expects to offer more than 1,000 connectors.

O’Flanagan readily admits that building a unique, composed stack, rather than adopting a monolithic suite, can introduce complexity. Connect aims to “solve some of the integration ‘tax’ of the composable DXP,” he said.

Content Hub One

Content Hub, Sitecore’s existing CMS solution, enables content planning, creation, production and managment within a single collaborative system. Content Hub One is an agile, headless iteration of Content Hub, available to brands wanting to deploy a holistic content strategy across a wide range of channels: web, mobile, smart screen displays, voice assistants, etc.

The offering envisages developers building front-ends for content delivery while marketers work in parallel to create the content.

Sitecore also said it was improving editing interfaces and testing capabilities within the Sitecore Experience Manager (XM) Cloud which offers Sitecore’s core CMS, along with other capabilities, as a native cloud product. (SItec’s traditional Platform DXP will continue to be available on private cloud with a subscription.

Consumers are ready for the metaverse

Sitecore also unveiled research at Symposium suggesting that consumer expectations for metaverse-type experiences are growing, even as the metaverse itself is still in the early stages of development.

• Perhaps surprisingly, almost 90% of consumers believe the metaverse will be important to the way they shop and interact with brands.
• Almost 80% expect to spend more time in the metaverse than on social media apps.
• Around 70% of marketers expect to develop metaverse-like experiences in 2023.
• Of those, around half anticipate devoting 10-25% of their marketing budget to those experiences.

The data was based on a survey of 1,000 U.S. consumers aged 18-70, and jus over 300 brand marketers.

Accenture partnership enhanced

Sitecore also announced an extension of its partnership with Accenture. Accenture, in part through its majority owned consultancy Avanade, has a long history of working with SItecore implementations and collaborations.

Sitecore will become a member of Accenture’s relative exclusive strategic platform group

Dig deeper: Sitecore transitions core solution to a modern cloud architecture

A fast pace

In 2020, when he joined Sitecore as CEO, Steve Tzikakis outlined his vision to MarTech: “We now need to become a ‘billion-dollar company.’ That’s not so much a financial objective, it’s more a behavioral change. The pace with which we release products, the integration of our products, the level of service we provide to our customers, how we operate with our partners and taking advantage of our biggest asset, our own employees.”

Product releases are coming at a fast pace and attention is being paid to integration through the Connect offering. It will be interesting to see the extent to which the bet on composability pays off.

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With this addition, the Acquia Open Digital Experience Platform will enable businesses to manage visual content workflow across the full cycle of digital experiences and enrich it with product data.

The Widen PIM offering centralizes product data for syndication across websites and ecommerce channels, making it a hand-in-glove fit for digital content creation workflows by marketing teams. The acquisition also introduces Acquia to new customers, as Widen currently boasts more than 700 organizations that use its technology, including New Balance, Energizer and Crayola.

Download the MarTech Intelligence Report on Enterprise Digital Asset Management Platforms (registration required)

Why we care. This deal follows the trend we’ve seen among some of Acquia’s DX competitors to provide digital asset management technology for users. For marketing teams, this goes much further than just the needs of a remote-work staff adjusting to the pandemic.

The demands for content management have never been greater due to the number of channels a marketing team needs to cover, and this content production needs to be centralized and data-enriched in order to be relevant to consumers.

You can see from the Real Story Group’s marketing technology subway map below that Adobe and Oracle are already aboard the DAM train, as well as two of Acquia’s direct competitors, Optimizely and Sitecore. The trend is towards one-stop shopping in the marketing tech space.

Dig deeper: The Real Story on MarTech’s case for digital asset management.

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