Partnership with Aprimo

Partnership with Aprimo

The most recent tool (and a buzzword) in the world of marketing automation is the emergence of the marketing resource management (MRM) pioneered by Aprimo (www.aprimo.com), an Indianapolis, Indian-based (US), privately-held vendor. Facing shrinking budgets, marketing departments are more accountable for the cost of their activities, and MRM applications are designed to improve the use of marketing resources. They should help marketing professionals to plan ahead for the factors like time for human resources, time for financial resources and responsibilities for different team members at different steps. The focus is on designing and creating a sound marketing strategy, determining the best allocation of marketing budgets, managing marketing skills, and more effectively tracking and supporting marketing processes, such as the marketing collateral creation. MRM combines workflow capabilities for assigning tasks and triggering alerts and knowledge management (KM) to comply with marketing best practices.

Tighter control over the projected budget, the planning, and the execution combined with a myriad of functions from campaign and lead management modules have pushed the limits of MA and that is the reason vendors such as Aprimo and Unica are now referring to their products as enterprise marketing management (EMM) solutions. To that end, Aprimo Marketing 6 is a suite of Web-based software products designed to enhance and work interfaced with existing ERP and CRM systems, as to enable marketing teams to achieve improved execution, gain managerial visibility across the global marketing organization and create more demand for products and services. Aprimo is delivering value to many industry-leading companies, including Bank of America, Alticor, Delta Faucet, Ernst & Young, Merrill Lynch and Pfizer. For more information on Aprimo and Unica, see Can the Market Sustain a Stand-Alone EMM? and Should Uniqueness Vouch For Marketing Automation Niche Players?.

As a result of the demand from their mutual customers, earlier in 2004, SAS and Aprimo announced a partnership to integrate the MRM products within the Aprimo Marketing suite into SAS Marketing Automation 4. The integrated solutions will be immediately available as a SAS offering through its global sales channels. The vendors cite that tightly linking the ability to execute and analyze with the ability to plan and manage should accelerate the marketing optimization cycle and decrease the disruptive time spent moving huge data loads between diverse environments.

The result was SAS' MA suite, comprised of proven customer data management, campaign management (an application used by marketers to design multi-channel marketing campaigns and track the effect of those campaigns, by customer segment, over time), predictive analytics, campaign, and optimization solutions. It also includes Aprimo's marketing planning and budgeting, production management, and marketing asset fulfillment and delivery management applications. The combined offering should give marketing departments an integrated environment to manage and coordinate pertinent marketing programs, activities and related resources.