Adrian Watkins

There are three trends that are changing the nature of martech. They will catalyze the end of the “first golden age of martech” and lay the foundation for a second golden age that will be much larger, but likely look quite different.

1. Ecosystems — instead of marketing cloud suites vs. best-of-breed point solutions, we will have the best of both: open platforms that serve as stable foundations, augmented by large ecosystems of specialized third-party apps that are more deeply integrated.
2. Experts — the lines between software vendors and professional services firms will blur: software companies will offer more expert services; services firms will automate and bottle their expertise in code.
3. (Citizen) Engineers — in a digital world where every company asymptotically becomes a “software business,” organizations will extend commercial platforms with customized customer experience apps and business process logic, many via “citizen developers.”

Yes, there’s been a large number of martech acquisitions this past year, and I expect that trend will accelerate.

Nearly half of the previous martech landscape was venture-funded, launching in the 2013-2017 martech funding heyday. Those companies are on a VC investment cadence that will force them into one of five moves this year or next:

• Go public
• Get acquired
• Raise more money
• Become sustainably profitable
• Scrap it.

Unless they’re on an up-and-to-the-right trajectory at scale, #1 and #3 are going to be tough. Many will seek #2 as the “easy” way out, making 2019 a buyer’s market in martech M&A.

The volume of those selling will exceed the capacity of buyers to absorb them all. However, the diversity of buyers will expand — an interesting trend that we’ll discuss in more detail.

Some will reconfigure to reach profitability. As the saying goes, SaaS never dies — it simply auto-scales to a smaller AWS instance. But sadly, more than a few will end up on the scrap heap.

Our three martech trends — ecosystems, experts, and (citizen) engineers — will define and enable a new wave of growth across the sector. They’re already coalescing today:

1. Platform ecosystems and networks as the center of gravity
2. Experts blending software and services to deliver outcomes
3. Developers and citizen developers shape the firm.

For a very detailed look at each of these points, please visit this link.