The traditional approach to enterprise software, often called a “walled garden,” locks business users into a predefined slate of technologies and pre-built data models. The “open garden” approach, which is relatively new to the industry, utilizes marketing technology designed to help marketers retain their legacy solutions while also counteracting entrenched data silos.
Best exemplified by a customer engagement hub (CEH), an open garden approach is meant to provide the same centralization of data and operational control as a single-vendor suite. With a customer engagement hub, brands are not locked into a predefined set of solutions. Instead, they are able to choose best-of-breed individual point solutions and tie them into a central system without regard to data type, data model, or data velocity.
Current State of the Fragmented Marketing Technology Ecosystem
The current state of the marketing technology ecosystem is fragmented. Modern marketers use 6 to 20 point solutions, with each solution ingesting unique data and operating with distinct business processes, rules, and analytic models. But because these point solutions don’t coordinate data, marketers operate with multiple data silos that complicate gaining the single view of the customer necessary for engaging omnichannel consumers.
Marketing clouds and other single-vendor suites were developed to counteract this technology fragmentation. The idea behind a marketing cloud is to provide an all-in-one solution with a walled garden data model that solves data and technology fragmentation. But this is proving impossible given the pace of innovation in the customer engagement technology market.
More than 5,300 distinct solutions across 49 product categories were identified by ChiefMarTec.com in the 2017 Marketing Technology Landscape. These product categories include mobile marketing, content marketing, personalization, etc. It is impossible for any single solution to fulfill all these needs. Even if such a solution existed, the vendor would have to release updates on a near constant basis to keep up. ChiefMarTec.com identified 150 solutions on their first landscape in 2011. The 5,300 solutions on the 2017 edition indicates growth of more than 3,000 percent in less than 10 years. This includes a 39 percent increase between 2016 and 2017 alone.
Walled Gardens: What’s the Issue?
An all-in-one suite is designed to provide every capability business users need in a single platform that operates on a walled garden data model. Enterprise software has traditionally functioned in this manner, locking organizations into a pre-defined collection of distinct technologies – each with its own data model and user interface. These solutions share information within the suite, and are interoperable with each other, but have difficulty communicating or sharing data with solutions outside the suite. That lack of communication with external technologies is why these solutions are considered walled gardens.
The lack of communication that accompanies a walled garden approach is a major problem. When brands choose a walled garden solution, they must typically replace their existing technology stack with the corresponding capabilities in the suite. Forty-four (44) percent of marketers already spend more than 25 percent of their budget on replacing existing technology, according to research from the CMO Council and RedPoint Global. Furthermore, Gartner research indicates that marketing budgets are climbing to 12 percent of company revenue. With this increase in marketing budgets, the 25 percent of budget spent on replacing existing solutions may be better spent creating great experiences for customers.
Single-vendor suites have not been broadly adopted either. Only 21 percent of marketers currently use an all-in-one suite, according to Walker Sands research, and only 16 percent of those users stay within their suite. Contrast this with the 48 percent of marketers using best-of-breed fragmented marketing technology (martech) stacks. With suites not performing their stated goal, there is a strong market need for a different way to achieve the single view of the customer necessary for engaging the always-connected consumer.
The Open Garden Approach Is the Future of MarTech
An open garden approach to martech, implemented with a customer engagement hub, is both flexible and adaptable. Deploying this solution doesn’t require re-platforming, and ultimately costs much less in time and resources than a walled garden approach. A customer engagement hub provides a unified customer view, along with an intelligent way to orchestrate engagement across all digital and traditional touchpoints, throughout the entire enterprise. This requires an architectural approach that unifies legacy solutions through a combination of connectors, robust APIs, and software development kits (SDKs) for custom extensions.
The open garden approach enables business users like the marketing team to take control of operations, from having a single unified view of customer data to orchestrating engagement across the enterprise. This is increasingly important in a real-time world, where consumers are always on and always addressable, and expect a consistent experience across touchpoints. This approach allows brands to effectively use all data to deliver highly relevant and personalized engagement with customers across multistage journeys.
The open garden hub’s ability to integrate existing solutions means it can also accept new technologies easily. As the pace of technology change advances over time, a customer engagement hub only requires that new connectors be put in place as systems are added. Through this ability to accept new solutions and integrate that data into a unified customer profile, the open garden approach to martech is effectively futureproof. Marketers never need to worry about re-platforming their central point of control because it embraces innovations in completing the last mile to the consumer.
The open garden approach to martech is a flexible, adaptable solution to the problem of technology fragmentation and channel-specific data silos. Where both an open garden hub and a walled garden suite provide a single customer view, the open garden provides it at a lower cost and in a more future-focused way. Brands that adopt an open garden approach to martech stand to benefit from this lower upfront cost, as well as the futureproof and flexible system architecture. All these factors combine to position the open garden hub as the future of customer engagement technology in a constantly changing solution landscape, enabling enterprises to embrace new innovations while taking the friction out of customer engagement.