Add another vendor to the Marketing Cloud fray.
Teradata on Tuesday updated its marketing products, revealed a partnership with Urban Airship and officially began calling its stack the “Integrated Marketing Cloud.”
Teradata isn’t a newcomer in the field of marketing tech. The company’s VP of marketing, Wes Moore, emphasized the company has been providing marketing solutions over the last few years. However, the marketing cloud label is new and in line with the messaging used by competitors like Adobe, Oracle and Salesforce.com.
“The Integrated Marketing Cloud is our collective platform,” Moore said. “[It] lets you have [various marketing] capabilities together, but also have an open architecture and API support to integrate with other solutions as appropriate.”
Teradata’s Marketing Cloud has five products, three of which were updated Tuesday. Its marketing operations capability (the core technology came from Teradata’s 2010 acquisition of marketing automation provider Aprimo) is designed to give a single view of running campaigns. This product is now globally available.
Teradata’s campaign-management product includes a customer-interaction manager widget and a “Real-Time Interaction Manager” widget. The latter, made possible via a partnership with Celebrus Technologies, is now globally available. It’s designed to let marketers crunch digital and offline data and send targeted messages to consumers in real-time.
There’s also a digital messaging application, which stems from Teradata’s 2012 acquisition of email marketing company eCircle. Teradata said Tuesday this has been enhanced through integration with the company’s campaign-management and customer-interaction tools. Additionally, a partnership with Urban Airship extends Teradata’s messaging capabilities into the mobile app environment.
The remaining two products constituting Integrated Marketing Cloud are newer focuses: marketing analytics and customer data management. “These are not areas we’ve historically pushed as heavily into market, but these are solutions we do provide today,” Moore said.
So in a world where marketing clouds from Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce.com and IBM already crowd the skies, where does Teradata fit in? The company has traditionally been associated with heavy, expensive tools and, as Moore said, “ROI is often the biggest inhibitor. It’s not a trivial investment to put together that customer journey.”
But Constellation Research CEO and principal analyst Ray Wang points out Teradata is trying to change its cost perception and has “improved [its] overall marketing automation stack.”
Teradata’s data warehouse and data analytics capabilities give it an advantage, Wang said: “A key differentiator is that they have a predictive analytics product and the tie back to the Teradata Data Warehouse is often seen as an advantage.”
Wang also lauded IBM, SAS and Oracle for their respective analytics and said Teradata, IBM, Oracle and independent marketing automation provider Marketo have “awesome marketing campaign management.”
An additional advantage for Teradata is its partner network. Besides Celebrus and Urban Airship, for example, the company is beginning to work with LiveRamp, which links online and offline information. “We’re forming a partnership … to use in display advertising channels,” Moore said. He added Teradata is also working with Gigya to augment social data attributes and manage consumer permissions.
According to Moore, Teradata has 1,500 clients worldwide using its Integrated Marketing Cloud, of which roughly 40% use at least two products from the stack.
