Summary: the demand generation market will continue to grow in 2010, and it may attract some new, big competitors from outside the industry. But the real excitement will be features that expand the scope of demand generation products to support inbound marketing, better measurement, and more efficient content creation. 2009 was a year of tremendous growth for demand generation systems (a.k.a. It's just a matter of time before CRM vendors (yes, I mean Salesforce.com ) and Web content management vendors decide to compete seriously for marketing automation business. MORE >>

These are exciting times in the world of analytical systems. The Web has created new demands to handle unprecedented data volumes and semi-structured data. Its core is a data structure that sits somewhere between columnar – now the most common approach for analytical processing – and hierarchical indexes. Most clients are using the system for customer data analytics, and the vendor has created connectors for SAP, Salesforce.com, Marketo, Responsys, ExactTarget, Omniture, Google Analytics, IBM, Microsoft, and NCR systems. Yes there are trade-offs. MORE >>

Summary: Oracle has integrated marketing automation with its on-demand CRM product. In February they released the first “Oraclized” version of the product, now Oracle CRM On Demand Marketing. This included a redesigned user interface that matches the look, feel, and terminology of Oracle’s on-demand CRM product, is available in the same 20 languages, and allows unified user IDs and log-ins. The new system uses the same data structures as the rest of Oracle CRM On Demand. Will competitors do the same? wonder if they had cake? MORE >>

Summary: One way to understand consolidation and competitive trends affecting marketing software is to look at systems across several dimensions: how closely they relate to customers; whether they are operational or analytical; and whether they support online or offline activities. Thus, a marketing automation system like Unica or Aprimo includes advertising management; CRM systems like Salesforce.com provide marketing automation; and ERM suites like SAP and Oracle include CRM. Tags: industry consolidation demand generation marketing automation analytical systems MORE >>

The company’s product touches the standard marketing automation bases: outbound email, landing pages and forms, lead nurturing, scoring and integration with Salesforce.com. Tags: behavior identification web analytics demand generation marketing automation lead management Summary: LeadForce1 infers Web visitors' intent and sales stage from the contents they read. It combines this with standard B2B marketing automation features to provide better-qualified leads to sales people. This intrigues me in its own way although it's not as much fun as looking at cool new technologies. MORE >>