This post is more or less a sequel to my previous entry. The CIO office is always in a state of flux when it comes to deciding between best-of-breed and Integrated solution for a given business requirement. Sure, I am not here to contest between both the approaches, as all of us agree both the roads have its own set of Pros and Cons.

However, when it comes to solutions that are designed to address marketing requirements, it’s essential to look at them through a high-caliber magnifying glass. Why? Technology is relatively a new entrant to the marketing world and thus the solutions that are available in the market are not really matured, except for a couple of them.

In the last decade or so, a whole lot of software players mushroomed creating software solution for marketing management area. Needless to say, a few of these players have indeed good point-solutions, but the limitation is, most of them are a bit myopic in their offering.

To illustrate this in an example, one of the Campaign Management vendors in the world, got rather a decent solution for Campaign Management function, however, it does not have anything around Campaign Management Function to make it effective – A plain vanilla campaign management solution is nothing but a glorified SQL black-box that abstracts the raw code to the user, nevertheless, does nothing more than what an SQL query is expected to deliver. Any enterprise that is considering to invest in a technology solution would want to know the ROI it can bring to the table over a period of time, a plain vanilla solution would sooner or later fail the ROI litmus test.

As an enterprise when it comes to investing in a Marketing Management Solution, please do exercise some caution. Data Management, Customer Analytics, Channel Integration and Marketing Reporting are a few of the core ingredients of marketing function. You might want to consider investing in point-solution if you have existing investments in these areas.

But… Even if you do have existing investments, ensure you do not have any licensing and hardware sizing limitations to use the existing Data Management and Reporting area for marketing management function. In my experience, in most of the cases there is always a challenge to address around these areas. So, I would think its wiser for enterprises that are considering investing into a Marketing Management solution to evaluate the solution basis its width and depth of offering and not get awed by a few screens that resembles the wand of Ron Weasley.

Some enterprises consider going for a full-fledged best-of-breed approach to address marketing management requirements. Sure. But do note the following few words when you consider offerings from multiple vendors – Integration, Security, Metadata Management, User Management, Upgrades, Updates, Scalability… These factors will spring up when you look at multiple solution integration and will make you grow old, real fast.

If you liked this article and want to know on how to look at a marketing management solution, I urge you to visit Transcentis to know more. I would really appreciate if you can either send your comment for this article or contact to let me know your views/feedback.