Summary: Alterian just announced Alchemy, which provides a new interface and tight integration across existing components. Alterian last week announced a new generation of products called Alchemy. It’s positioning these as “customer engagement solutions” rather than “campaign management” solutions. The general idea seems to be that customer engagement involves digital dialogs while traditional campaign management is mostly about outbound messages. Happily, there’s more here than new labels. across channels. a new user interface built using the Microsoft Silverlight platform. MORE >>

Summary: HubSpot has continued to grow its customer base and expand its product. It's looking more like a conventional small-business marketing automation system every day. You have to admire a company that defines a clear strategy and methodically executes it. HubSpot has always aimed to provide small businesses with one easy-to-use system for all their marketing needs. The company began with search engine optimization to attract traffic, and added landing pages, blogging, Web hosting, lead scoring, and Salesforce.com integration. But I wouldn’t be surprised if they changed their minds. MORE >>

Summary: Vendors who target small businesses include provide functions beyond traditional marketing automation. This helps business owners who need to generate revenue as efficiently as possible. But larger firms need to be efficient too: so expect all marketing automation systems to eventually expand in similar ways. The replies are rolling in from the survey of vendor features that I mentioned last week. Reminder: you can upload the 150+ questions for your own RFP from www.raabguide.com.) These include Genoo , Hubspot , Infusionsoft and OfficeAutoPilot. MORE >>

Summary: Eloqua10 provides much-needed update to Eloqua's user interface and a new reporting infrastructure for “revenue performance management”. Neither change is revolutionary but both substantially improve the company’s competitive position within the crowded B2B marketing automation industry. Eloqua is slated to officially release its long-promised Eloqua10 system on November 21. The main changes are an updated user interface and a new foundation for what the company calls "revenue performance management". Let’s start with the interface. The new interface is a huge improvement. MORE >>

Summary: a CMO Council survey shows that CMOs and CIOs agree they need to cooperate, but disagree on how well they're doing and what their roles should be. Both sides need to work harder to close an increasingly-unacceptable gap. This affects marketing automation vendors too, since they sell to both sides. The CMO Council and Accenture Interactive recently released a study Aligning the CMO and CIO to Achieve Agile Intelligent Marketing based on parallel surveys of about 300 members of each group. The free 32-page summary provides a detailed analysis and commentary. Or both. You decide. MORE >>