Are the cloud wars over? Many companies are or have choosen a marketing stack. The issue can be that whatever capabilities that marketing stack has, the CMO is stuck with. And it may be that the stack has every thing they need, but maybe it doesn’t. That may mean that a marketer ends up choosing a number of different solutions, which generally don’t talk to each other or update the customer profile. That could be a competitive disadvantage.
But what if those various marketing solutions could talk to each other and be informed by data from other systems? It could mean that those solutions could actually be more valuable. And this is the topic at hand and is on the real-time futurescape of Tealium®, the market leader in enterprise tag management and solutions who announced not only record first quarter results, but also an additional $20 million in growth financing led by Silver Lake Waterman. The funding will be used to accelerate global expansion across all business segments, including engineering, sales, customer service and marketing.
Jeff Lunsford, Tealium CEO said, “An estimated $1.5 trillion is spent annually on global marketing and communications and approximately $130 billion of this is spent on marketing technology. The rapid adoption of Tealium’s award-winning solutions can help enterprises get much higher returns from their marketing investments.” Why? It doesn’t matter which marketing clouds or point solutions companies are using, Tealium creates a data foundation that allows the marketers to control, own and act on their data stream. But wait, there’s more… The part that really caught my eye is the ability to make those applications work better together to help drive more profitable, real-time customer interactions across all digital channels.
In the age of collaboration (personal / company) for which my colleague Alan Lepofsky at Constelation is known for, the idea that software vendors could really live in an ecosystem that makes them individually and also separately more successful seems like where the future should take us. However, the competitive nature of the vendor scape has made the idea of collaboration where the individual and the collective become more valuable is not always the first thing on everyone’s mind.
My point of view is that every software solution has some sort of historical technological footprint – meaning that they started out doing one thing really well. And then as customers requested more features and functionality or engineers / developers saw new opportunities to expand the product, they added more capabilities. And as time goes by those point solutions grow into suites – either by developing their own features and functions, but also often by acquiring companies.
Now let’s look at the model of collaboration Tealium is proposing as future picture of how software vendors can become more successful. Providing software vendor collaboration to make the parts and the whole more successful is a different way to look at expanding the features, functions and capabilities as well as benefits of any one “point solution” or “software package suite.” Perhaps I grew up idealistically hoping that the world would see that when each of us wins, we all win. That was the point in the movie, A Beautiful Mind. But it’s not really how many CEOs think – yet. Perhaps this type of thinking, and the ability to execute on it, will create that shift.
Tealium’s $20 million in growth financing, led by Silver Lake Waterman, brings the total the company has raised since January 2012 to $47.5 million, with Battery Ventures and Tenaya Capital leading earlier financings. Shawn O’Neill, Managing Director and Co-Head of Silver Lake Waterman said, “We are pleased to be supporting Tealium’s global expansion efforts. Enterprises will continue to invest heavily in technologies that improve their customers’ experiences across all digital touch points, and we see Tealium as the market leader in the space.” What I like about what O’Neill said was that we may now be able to transform that customer experience. It’s a topic near and dear to my heart; as a customer advocate I’ve been writing about this topic for a good 20 years. It seems now the technology is starting to catch up with the ideals we in the customer service and customer experience world have been writing about. And do it at scale. More to come soon.
Tealium®’s Enterprise Tag Management Capabilities
If you want to catch Tealium’s social media conversations, you can find them here:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tealium
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tealium
Twitter: https://twitter.com/tealium
And here’s Tealium’s Q1 operating highlights, in case you don’t know much about them:
· 120% revenue growth, buoyed by strong global demand for its market-leading solutions.
· 100% growth in enterprise customers worldwide, with select new customer wins and expanded strategic relationships, including Calendars.com, Carhartt, Kabbage, Kimberly-Clark, Mason Companies, Solstice Sunglasses, Wet Seal, Wine.com, the world’s largest toy retailer, and one of the industry’s largest semiconductor chip manufacturers.
· Tealium continued its strong growth in e-commerce and now has 68 clients listed in the prestigious Internet RetailerTop 500.
· 120% revenue renewal rate during the first quarter, resulting from a total commitment to customer success and the industry’s most comprehensive training and education program.
· Management team expansion, adding technology veterans Tracy Hansen, formerly of CA Technologies and NetApp, as CMO, and Doug Lindroth, previously with Limelight Networks and Memec, as CFO.
· Tealium AudienceStream, the company’s new audience segmentation and data distribution solution, was namedNew Technology of the Year by the Digital Analytics Association (DAA) as part of its Awards for Excellence Program in March.
· Recognized by Forbes Magazine as one of America’s Most Promising Companies for 2014.
· Tealium’s global user conference, Digital Velocity, drawing hundreds of customers, strategic partners and digital marketing thought leaders from around the globe. Customer speakers included Ancestry.com, Lenovo, Lincoln Financial Group, Citrix and many more. The event concluded with Tealium University, a formalized training program for tag management and real-time unified marketing initiatives.
I’m very curious to see how this all pans out. Will vendors see the value in using a vendor like Tealium to make their software better and create better customer experiences? Or will they go into hoarding mode and be short sited?
@DrNatalie