Good morning: It’s the cloud, of course

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Good morning, Marketers, and here’s another reason the marketing tech space looks like it does.

Tony Byrne of Real Story Group talks about the continued fragmentation of the marketing technology space, where new vendors appear at such a rate as to outstrip any trend towards consolidation. He gives six good reasons for this.

Which prompts me to weigh in with another reason. There are so many new vendors, often offering not much more than a specific niche solution (possibly a great one) because of the logistics of launching any kind of tech start-up in today’s cloud-based digital economy.

Unlike the old on-prem days, you don’t need warehouses, you don’t need a distribution network, you only have to get people to subscribe to software, not invest in hardware. And forget about tech: Compare a cloud-based business with any other kind of earthbound business. Starting up is streamlined as never before. Of course the space keeps growing.

Kim Davis

Editorial Director

What we’re reading. The question shouldn’t be “Do you work more productively at home or in the office,” but “Do you learn more at home or in the office?” Alex Atzberger, CEO of Optimizely, says he learns a lot from visiting the company’s offices. And he started a great discussion about it.

About The Author

Kim Davis

Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Prior to working in tech journalism, Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.