Some 90% of marketing cloud platforms will still lack a fully integrated marketing solution by 2019, according to Gartner predictions released this week.
The rapid growth of marketing cloud platforms based on acquisition has led to fragmented technology, and although many cloud marketers are making steps to integrate, Gartner predicts that the majority will still not have fully integrated their technology by 2019.
The research and analyst firm also reports that despite the continued growth of the marketing technology ecosystem, IT may struggle to keep up.
To keep pace in burgeoning markets across social, mobile, Big Data and the Internet of Things (IoT), Gartner asserts that current IT marketing infrastructure needs to place a priority on agility and speed.
Gartner predicts that by 2018 only a quarter of companies will have the technology wherewithal to focus their efforts and IT strategy on agility and speed, as opposed to security and management. The analyst firm also predicts that IT will play an increasing role in social marketing application decisions -- moving into an area that marketers have been managing and budgeting for years.
By 2018, Gartner predicts that 50% of social marketing technology and strategy decisions will be made by IT -- a leap from 30% today.
Gartner predicts growth in optimizing marketing budgets based on marketing performance metrics, and says that financial transactions will need the agility of reallocating money in real-time. By 2019, more than 50% of MRM implementations will include marketing financial management -- up from less than 25% today.
Although agility is essential in a marketing ecosystem led by real-time actions and personalized data, it’s important for IT and marketing leaders to not forget about their security systems if they are not currently up to par.
Email-based spear phishing attacks can be incredibly costly to companies, and cost an estimated estimated $1.6 million per incident, according to a recent study by security company Cloudmark.