Scott Brinker

Tech stacks are large. The empirical stack data we recently shared from Zylo, a leading SaaS management platform, showed that even after a year of belt-tightening, the average SMB (500 employees or less) still has 162 SaaS apps. Mid-market companies (500 to 2,500 employees) have 245. And large enterprises have 650. This isn’t particularly surprising any more, is it? Oh, and by the way, those numbers don’t include: (1) Any custom apps the company has …

Visible and invisible tech stacks, and the upsides and downsides of “shadow IT” in martech and beyond Continue Reading »

First, one more reminder: please take our Martech Composability Survey this week. When you see the questions, I think you’ll agree that having a statistically significant dataset for a “no BS” view of this topic would be super valuable for the whole martech community. We’ll share the full results publicly. But we need your participation. Please and thank you! I’ve been adovcating the benefits of aggregation platforms in martech stacks for a couple of years …

Can martech data be unified, federated, and siloed all at the same time? Yes, and each serves a purpose Continue Reading »

First, a quick ask: please take this 5-minute survey on martech composability. We’ll share the full results back with everyone. I bet it will be very interesting. Thank you! Okay, back to today’s post… I prefer empircal data over gut-feel prognostications. For 12 years, I’ve been told that SaaS in general — and martech in particular — is going to dramatically consolidate. People can be quite vehement in such predictions. Yet year over year over …

Well, SaaS tech stacks shrank from 2023 to 2024… but only by 8%. You were expecting more? Continue Reading »

It’s that time of the year. The Northern hemisphere looks forward to spring. The Southern hemisphere looks forward to fall. And everybody in martech and marketing operations looks forward to the annual Stackie Awards. This will be our 10th edition of The Stackies: Marketing Tech Stack Awards. Wow, a decade of hundreds of martech stack slides: 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023. We’d love for you to join this martech community tradition with us this year. To enter …

The 2024 Stackie Awards are now open for entries — share a slide of your martech stack, everybody wins Continue Reading »

Dear marketing readers: hang in with me here. I have a point. Promise. I started programming as a kid, writing multiplayer games for dial-up bulletin board systems (BBSs) — a precursor to the web and social media as we know it today. It was the late 80’s, early 90’s, and I mostly wrote in a language called C, with some occasional high-performance components written in 8086 Assembly language. For those of you who aren’t software …

Developer vs. non-developer is the wrong divide; what matters with no-code is knowing what you’re doing Continue Reading »

Welcome to 2024! I expect this will be a transformative year in martech. The Martech for 2024 report we published last month (video presentation) covered several of the major trends underway, such as aggregation and composability in stacks — especially in the data layer with cloud data warehouses, lakehouses, and lakes. The common theme of those trends is a breaking down of the boundaries between different martech apps and platforms. The silo’s days are numbered. …

The amazing turning point when martech systems complexity and martech UX complexity diverge Continue Reading »

Last week, Frans Riemersma and I published our Martech for 2024 report, an in-depth analysis of the evolving martech landscape in the gen AI era and the underlying forces of aggregation and composability that are shaping it. You can download a free copy here. We also hosted an hour-long presentation, discussing many of the themes of the report, with the added color commentary of two giant martech nerds armchair industry analysts weighing in on some …

Missed our Martech for 2024 jam session? Catch the replay and get the 89-page report for free Continue Reading »

There was a meme circulating around social media last week of an agency marketer rambling in a “thought leadership” interview on TikTok. I have no idea if it was parody or real. Or more accurately, if it was intentional or accidental parody. It was a jumbled jubilee of buzzword bingo – personalization, data, brand, experience, customer-centricity — that wound up saying absolutely nothing at all. There but for the grace of God go I in …

Major trends in martech for 2024: the real changes underway in a 99% platitude-free report Continue Reading »

Want to know what 2024 has in store for martech? I’m not talking about wild-eyed, hand-wavy, link-baity prognostications that proliferate in every year-end prediction season like that one Mariah Carey Christmas tune. I mean real-world, fact-based, happening-now trends that will inform your marketing operations and technology strategy for the next 12 months. On December 5, Frans Riemersma and I will release a 50+ page report on Martech for 2024. Based on our research over the …

What will happen in martech in 2024? A no-BS report and webinar by two giant martech nerds Continue Reading »