Day 2’s opening session continued the theme of “A New Way to Engage” and started with Chris Wong, VP of strategy and Product Management in IBM’s Commerce group. IBM now has 30,000 users in their Marketing Cloud. Chris said that IBM thinks the way for marketers to move forward in the rapidly changing technology landscape is to collaborate better and take advantage of the technologies that enable collaboration while simplifying the ability to get things done.
Acxiom CEO Scott Howe talked about how we don’t have perfect information to make perfect decisions. Even if we had perfect data, we don’t have the ability to analyze the data completely enough to make perfect decision. Acxiom has been working with IBM to build out a seamless environment to deliver insights to third parties like Facebook and others.
Chris formally announced the new IBM Marketing Cloud. The Marketing Cloud is based on SilverPop technology that IBM recently acquired. The Marketing Cloud is fully multi tenant and subscription based.
IBM Marketing Software is the on premise version of IBM marketing tools. These tools are getting enhanced with predictive capabilities.
IBM is also delivering share capabilities to bridge the on premise and cloud systems. The share capabilities include Journey Analytics, Journey Designer and more.
For planning and budgeting, IBM is integrating Allocadia’s cloud based platform into the Marketing Cloud and Marketing Operations.
To solve data integration challenges IBM is creating a data exchange capability that will allow customers to set up integrations to both IBM and third party systems.
