We just released a major update to our Marketing Automation and Social Software Evaluation Report. This edition includes updated evaluations of:

• Oracle (Eloqua and Social Relationship Management)
• Salesforce (ExactTarget Marketing Cloud and ExactTarget Email)
• IBM (Enterprise Marketing Management & Silverpop)
• Sysomos

You will also find two vendors added to the evaluation line-up:

• Teradata
• HubSpot

These vendors fall into different categories like digital marketing platforms, marketing automation suites, and social media analytics services. We'll save vendor-specific commentary for later blog posts, but let me call out some overall themes here.

• The name of the game for digital marketing vendors has been acquisitions and more acquisitions – as you can perhaps gauge from the multiple product names across the list above. More often than not, this results in significant functionality overlaps and the vendors themselves will need a lot of time figure out how to deal with the attendant confusion.


• Further, different products have been acquired in different time periods, and enterprise buyers need to be aware of which products have been actually integrated and which products are integrated only in marketing brochures.


• My last conclusion: the importance of critically evaluating vendor claims against actual customer experiences on the ground.  This holds regardless of acquisitions; even the rare digital marketing vendor pursuing an organic strategy can overstate what their offering really does...

We critically evaluate marketing technology vendors along these lines (and several other parameters). The updated report is available for immediate download to subscribers.

Non-subscribers: note that you can download a sample evaluation chapter.