SiriusDecisions announced the publication of our first ever SiriusView for marketing resource management (MRM) technologies. The SiriusView covers nine vendors relevant to B2B marketers, all having four sets of core features: budgeting, project management, asset management and communication.

As the complexity of marketing activities increases and the amount of data associated with those activities rises, B2B marketing leaders must rely more heavily on marketing resource management (MRM) technology to gain insight into the impact and ROI of their marketing operations.

Yesterday SiriusDecisions announced the publication of our first ever SiriusView for MRM. The SiriusView covers nine vendors relevant to B2B marketers: Allocadia, BrandMaker, IBM (formerly Unica,) Infor (formerly Orbis Global), Microsoft (formerly MarketingPilot), PTI (MarcomCentral), Saepio (MarketPort), SAS (formerly Assetlink) and Teradata (formerly Aprimo). Vendors were scored based on their depth of functionality, essential elements (services/support) and vendor strength.

SiriusDecisions defines MRM technology by the following four sets of core features:

  • Budgeting. These features allow planners to develop a hierarchical budget allocation model that distributes budget to multiple entities (e.g. campaigns composed of programs across industries and geographies) and across activities that span multiple fiscal periods.
  • Project management. These features enable project team members to know who is working on what, and when and where. Capabilities include defining jobs; establishing roles, workflows and dependencies; and assigning resources.
  • Asset management. These features provide a secure central repository for marketing materials with version control management. They support a wide range of file types (e.g. images, logos, templates, packaging, video, audio) and can render files in alternate formats and provides information about the assets.
  • Communication. These features allow marketers to share plans with a community of constituents who need to know about budgets, activities, projects and assets. The marketing calendar allows constituents to view all marketing campaigns, programs and activities in a timeline. Dashboards and reporting summarize information and can drill down into detail across the applications, including time-bound, project-bound, campaign-bound and vendor-bound views.

Providers of MRM applications are now more attuned to how marketers do their jobs, and the applications are more configurable and manageable by the people who use them. SiriusDecisions recommends that B2B marketing leaders consider using an MRM application if they are not doing so already.