Marketo Boss Says Marketing Tech Sector Has Barely Even Started

Tech marketing firm Marketo’s results announced last week provide further evidence – if any was needed – of the robust health of the marketing technology sector. The company reported strong revenue growth and cut its losses further.

CEO Phil Fernandez (pictured below) pointed to strong billings growth (up 48 per cent over last year) saying increased leverage on the operating model helped reduce operating loss and, (more importantly for a business at this stage of its development ) helped deliver the best cash flow performance in the company’s history.

Marketo is one of the few remaining pure play digital marketing platforms with anything approaching scale. Since 2009, Adobe, IBM, Oracle and Salesforce have swept the monopoly board as they built their tech stacks. During that time Marketo’s leadership has remained steadfast by the idea that integration would be best served primarily by a build-your-own platform approach.

Announcing the results, Fernandez spoke about the growing activities of clients but it was this comment that struck us – and which speaks volumes about why marketing is running hot at the moment. “I believe our traditional B2B marketing automation market remains very fast growing and only fractionally penetrated.”

Later in response to an analyst query, he expanded on the subject, “This market is still overwhelmingly greenfield. In B2B, it’s virtually all greenfield and I made the comments about being loathed to comment on swathes. There are swathes, obviously, but it is just a vast market that is little penetrated.”

He contrasted the B2B market with the B2C space which he said was largely penetrated with e-mail products” “lots and lots of the different batch and blast email stuff, as well as an earlier generation of on-premise database marketing software.

“So that does tend to be more of a replacement market, but a very distinct generational replacement market and so little different dynamics in each of those categories. But just relative to the modern generation of technology, none of these markets are even five per cent penetrated through my eyes,” he said.

This article originally appeared at www.which-50.com

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