This is why it’s hard to imagine that low-priced software can deliver similar performance to mainstream products. The company’s marketing is tightly targeted at very small businesses (under 25 employees) but its marketing features are competitive with demand generation products aimed at much larger firms. Of the other two, lead scoring is primitive at best (I only saw an ability to apply segment tags, which I suppose is all you really need; the company says lead scoring is available “but we don’t advertise it because we haven’t made it easy enough within the software yet”). MORE >>

This is a bit perplexing, since those products are at the opposite ends of the spectrum: Marketo being relatively low cost / limited functionality / easier to learn, and Eloqua being higher cost / richer functionality / takes more training. But what really concerns me is that these people are apparently limiting their consideration to just those two products. do recognize that they are the best known vendors in the space (with apologies to Vtrenz , whose identity is somewhat blurred since its purchase by Silverpop ). Just kidding.or Click read my March 18 review.] MORE >>

The first thing I want to make clear is that QlikView is a wonderful product, so it would be a great pity if this discussion were to be taken as a criticism. Like any product, QlikView works within limits that must be understood to use it appropriately. find two fundamental benefits from the product. This is more a law of nature (there’s no free lunch) than a weakness in the product, but it does exist. Yes QlikView is a fabulous product. A few days ago, I replied to a question regarding QlikTech scalability. See What Makes QlikTech So Good? So far so good. MORE >>

According to Brian, Knotice bases its claim on three capabilities: - users can create interactive campaigns in all four media from the same system - campaigns in all media access a shared customer profile - medium-specific message templates can draw on “medium-agnostic” components in a shared content repository This certainly gives Knotice greater breadth than products aimed at just one channel. In other words, this is yet another example of that familiar tension between integrated suites and best-of-breed specialists. Brian confirmed that this is their specialty. Time will tell MORE >>

MarketingPilot is best described as integrated marketing management for mid-tier companies. It’s no coincidence that MarketingPilot, like three of the five other deals I just listed, involves a B2C rather than B2B marketing automation product. The B2C products are generally built on a more powerful foundation than B2B systems, in terms of having a more flexible database structure, deeper marketing operations support, and more powerful analytics. Financial terms were not disclosed. I profiled them in a February 2011 post.) The acquisition is significant on several levels. MORE >>