Ten marketing technology companies are leading an initiative with over 190 co-signatories to publicly pledge to design software that eliminates data siloes by shifting away from a CRM-centric approach. The Platform of Independents is led by Segment co-founder and CEO Peter Reinhardt and includes Airship, Amplitude, Iterable, Mixpanel, Outreach, Pendo, Radar and Tray.io.
The formal declaration of the companies’ shared ideals was published in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal and displays their united stance on developing products that don’t lock their customers into a solution suite. Instead, they want to build tools that can serve organizations and their departments independently but enable users to have more freedom to share data.
Why we care
Marketers are not alone in the struggle of being forced into working with fragmented data and technology — the impact spans entire organizations. It’s so common that a recent Gartner report found that “no single CRM vendor is capable of providing the full functionality a business needs to support a complete customer data stack.”
Despite the fact that CRM vendors have spent over $30 billion over the last two years acquiring different applications and technologies, it hasn’t been enough to solve the underlying issues. Acquisitions still force users into using a suite, limiting their customers’ choices or creating the need for IT departments to invest time into costly integrations for outside solutions.
“The time has come for businesses to realize that there’s a whole new world outside the legacy CRM suite,” said Reinhardt. “Together with our partners, we’re proud to stand up for what’s best for our customer-first businesses in the digital age: choice, flexibility and the freedom to build data stacks using any combination of best-in-class technology. In short, CRM just isn’t enough anymore.”
More on the news
- The companies that have signed the pledge span a variety of marketing technology capabilities including customer data infrastructure providers, conversational marketing platforms and analytics solutions.
About The Author
Jennifer Videtta Cannon serves as Third Door Media’s Senior Editor, covering topics from email marketing and analytics to CRM and project management. With over a decade of organizational digital marketing experience, she has overseen digital marketing operations for NHL franchises and held roles at tech companies including Salesforce, advising enterprise marketers on maximizing their martech capabilities. Jennifer formerly organized the Inbound Marketing Summit and holds a certificate in Digital Marketing Analytics from MIT Sloan School of Management.