| | November 20139CIOReviewWhile a lot of people are talking about consumerization of IT, very few companies are on the front lines the way we are. Everyday, I talk with marketing decision makers in the C-suite and I feel that they are frustrated with the plethora of SaaS solutions that do not interconnect. This makes on-boarding new employees a nightmare ­ there are 5-7 applications that each new employee must learn how to use ­ just to support best-practice digital marketing. As every application works differently, there is no concept of leveraged learning and no 360-degree view of the customer is possible.Today's marketing leaders expect SaaS solutions to work the way Facebook and Twitter work, providing a live feed that showcases results in real time. On an average, people login to our dashboard view ­ which is a stream of results as they happen ­ 27 times per week. What is in right now is marketing automation which is the ability to automate campaigns that build relationships and accelerate conversion and what is out is SEO (Search Engine Optimization). While the "findability" in search remains incredibly important, Google has made it almost impossible for Enterprise marketers to see what organic keywords are driving the majority of their traffic, by changing the way it reports results.For a disruptive solution like ours, I think the biggest challenge is to believe in yourself that you can take on much bigger, more entrenched competitors and win. Today Bislr is consistently winning deals from its competitors like Marketo, Eloqua and Pardot. While these competitors have much deeper pockets, the obvious name recognition ­ what they do not have is a product architected from the get-go to meet the needs of the modern marketer. In fact, one of our real strengths is the ability to integrate in "web hooks", which enables our customers to set up automated programs around their products, to drive conversion of "free trials" into paid customer status.One of the trends which are shaping the future of the industry is Predictive Analytics. We have scratched the surface about what predictive analytics has the potential to help the marketer understand where the prospect is in the buying cycle, their sense of urgency, and their digital body language says about their readiness to talk with a sales person to buy. Data Variability Challenges need to be SolvedSandy Steier, Founder & CEO, 1010DataFounded in 2000, 1010data is a provider of Cloud-based analytics for Big Data. The company has raised $35 million from Norwest Venture Partners creating an increased demand for data driven solutions to help solve the challenges associated with the data explosion. For example, the volume and variety of data coming from IT systems itself is drowning departments and the inability to apply market intelligence to this data is preventing them from extracting actionable insights from their investments. In order to help enterprises address these challenges, we foresee a continuation of the trends from software to software-as-a-service (SaaS), to platform-as-a-service (PaaS), to the growing need to data-as-a-service (DaaS). DaaS, for example, can help to provide an industrialized approach to clean and enrich IT data to be directly leveraged across all IT processes.ChallengesThe biggest challenges that entrepreneur face is that when they create innovative enterprise solutions to address a big market need, they usually fail to recognize the legacy anchor. Failing to do so prohibits enterprises from becoming the pervasive companies that they need to become in order to be successful. When building companies and products today, entrepreneurs must account for the legacy anchor, be able to work with it and only (after successfully working with it) can the enterprise replace the legacy anchor. That is the biggest challenge that entrepreneurs face today.Intelligent Marketing is about Automation and AnalyticsMichael Sharkey, Co-Founder & CEO, BislrBased in San Francisco, Bislr provides intelligent marketing solutions for professional marketers. The company has received a total funding of $8.81 million from Tim Draper, Terry Garnett and Southern Cross Venture Partners. Michael Sharkey
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