• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, April 21, 2009

StrongMail Systems is expected to unveil Wednesday the next version of its email campaign management offering, touting "cloud" computing features. Put simply, that means marketers can now own the hosted app or sign up for StrongMail Message Studio V 5.0 as an on-demand Software as a Service (SaaS), allowing budgets to remain flexible as clients sign on or drop off.

StrongMail Message Studio V 5.0 enables marketers to own the platform and take advantage of cloud computing. It enables companies to easily leverage customer data to improve results, while lowering resource requirements and costs. Marketers who sign on to have the system hosted typically rely on multitenant applications used by thousands of other customers because it's easy to install. The ability to own the hosted solutions allows companies to gain tighter integrations with other IT platforms and build on purchased assets.

The new version, available now, includes many new features that allow marketers to improve campaign performance and reduce costs by simplifying and streamlining traditionally resource-intensive activities, including advanced analysis, reporting and data integration, according to Ryan Deutsch, VP of strategic and market development at StrongMail Systems.

While cloud computing gives customers the benefit of ownership, the real challenge became educating marketers to determine if they wanted the service, Deutsch said. "When we talked to clients about the idea of going up into the cloud -- allowing customers to scale up and down as needed and only pay for what they use -- it sounded appealing," he said. "We provision slices or segments of the infrastructure. This lets the customer consume just the right amount of infrastructure to run the application."

The new version also includes a datamart within the platform to allow marketers to aggregate the data, and business intelligence (BI) tools. One of the main challenges faced by marketers is gaining access to all the information required to produce and send relevant email messages. The datamart provides companies that don't have the resources and tools to aggregate and manage the data.

The BI tools give marketers the ability to analyze the data. Rather than look at the information at the campaign level, marketers can review the information based on customer segments such as geography and conversion rates.

Deutsch has seen marketers bring in third-party data to track attributes they had not in the past.