Data Unification

If you thought a marketing cloud would solve your customer data woes, you may want to think again. “An MC may still require you to stitch together data and connect it to execution systems — even after you thought you had handed off the problem once and for all,” writes argues ActionIQ CEO Tassos Argyros…

Data has a way of pushing organizations to rush. There’s an urgency to catch up to data-driven competitors, and pressure to build a full-fledged data department immediately. That can cause corporations to jump straight into data initiatives or make big data decisions without a clear strategy. This can be a big mistake, diffusing efforts or…

By now, every relevant corporation in the world has emphasized data as a keystone of their marketing, sales and lead generation strategy. But data, of course, is not an end goal in itself. Data is a means to an end. Information and customer insights are what corporations need to launch personalized, relevant, insightful sales and…

If you’re like most marketers, you store data in a warehouse like Hadoop, Oracle, or Teradata, which captures billions of customer event and transaction details. In theory, you expect to use all that rich data to better personalize customer experiences and marketing, specifically emails. While the Marketing Cloud ESPs claim they can ingest all your…

Marketing clouds offer tremendous benefits. As a one-stop-shop, they give you the ability to have all your marketing tools, applications, and data easily accessible and integrated. Also, you don’t have to deal with IT overhead.  That’s the theory. In reality, the large marketing clouds of Adobe, Oracle and Salesforce were built by acquiring companies with…

Nathaniel Popper from The New York Times published a revealing article regarding the ongoing tech company claims that big banks are pulling in the reins when it comes to sharing customer data. Big retail banks, Silicon Valley executives say, are refusing to pass along information around the fees and interest rates that they charge their…

What keeps us on earth? What keeps the earth rotating around the sun? Gravity, you say. Data also has “gravity”.  a16z partner Peter Levine said it in on a recent a16z Podcast: The Storage Renaissance. “Data has to live somewhere and be made accessible. It might not be sexy, but storage and cloud computing is what…

To be honest, when the term Big Data was first coined in 2000 – and then found its way onto the main stage about a decade or so ago, I wasn’t a fan. I’m still not. Not that Big Data isn’t important, because it is. It’s just that the term meant everything and nothing all…

I read the other day that “Data is like water” and thought what a great analogy.  Most living things cannot live without water very long. Thank goodness, for most of us, water is abundant.  It falls from the sky. If not treated right, water can get contaminated, and harm those who consume it. I concluded…

The dreaded data bottleneck. Every department in every enterprise has one (at least). And they all must be smashed if your organization hopes to leverage all the competitive advantage that’s buried deep inside your data.