“The value of an idea lies in the using of it.”
– Thomas A. Edison
I have been traveling this week meeting with Partners and Customers. I was particularly excited about my meeting with Aprimo and IBM. As part of the 2017 strategic planning, I am narrowing our solution and partner focus so we can provide a high level of service and quality to our customers and more robust training to our staff.
Aprimo has just been purchased from Teradata and the new company has the traditional MRM and campaign tools we’re all familiar with, however, they’ve added a product called Revenue which is a tool for channel management and campaign execution. This tool will be particularly useful in B to B to C scenarios, such as with financial advisor relationships or car manufactures with their car dealerships. Combined with our approach around the Content Hub this could be a powerful addition to our content strategy. We are in a good position to drive a productive and fruitful partnership in the coming years.
Secondly, I was invited to attend the IBM Watson conference on cognitive computing. What a tremendous event, I was so impressed with the product suites and positing. An old friend of mine is running the IBM marketing cloud business, she introduced us to a number of influential product management leaders. Many of the tools in the Marketing cloud will fit nicely into our managed services offering, especially when we expand beyond ILM and ALM to include marketing production services. We are definitely ramping up our partnership with IBM. They have the right customers for us with the right level of access to help us more quickly achieve our top 25 account strategy.
Let’s go be great,
Brad