Lyris today announced three in a promised series of “mini applications” that will allow its users to configure custom solutions by using enterprise service bus (ESB) approaches employed by large enterprises. The additions to its platform, Lyris says, will give all marketers the flexibility to choose, configure, and swap out application components with their own alternatives, or ones provided by Lyris or other technology vendors.
“The reality is that most marketing clouds are walled gardens not based on open standards, but on proprietary API scripting standards that are expensive and difficult to maintain. You need to rely on the vendor or app developers in order to tailor solutions to your business needs,” says Lyris CMO Alex Lustberg. “Marketers need to get set up quickly and so they go with a Salesforce or an Oracle that can be used out of the box. But they end up only using 10% to 20% of its capabilities. They are forced to make a choice of the least worst system.”
The three mini applications introduced by Lyris include:
- A data mapper to connect rich customer data and intelligence between Lyris and third-party cloud systems like Salesforce;
- a reputation monitor that does email scoring and enhances workflow capabilities;
- and a set of automatically generated engagement analytics that augment customer profiles with data from email interactions.
“Marketers need out-of-box solutions to get started, but when they want to do custom integration, how do they get it done?” posits Akin Arikan, Lyris’s senior director of product marketing. “We didn’t invent this architecture. For companies that don’t have this underlying technology, our solution gives them a point-and-drag, visual way to configure new applications.”
Lustberg points out that marketers will require some minimal assistance from IT to master the system, but promises that on-staff marketing technologists are not necessary.
