New Orleans was heavily blanketed with humidity last week. Hurricane Nate had just skidded by briefly, sparing the city anything much worse than a Saturday night curfew — bad enough. The DMA &Then event was not unaffected; on the expo floor I heard about many meetings canceled because people had decided not to fly into the storm.
But there were still interesting people to meet and high-profile vendors to catch up with. Aprimo, for example. The Indianapolis-based enterprise marketing management vendor has been around almost 20 years — that makes it a century-old company in “marketing technology years,” a true veteran, and DMN has been covering it for about as long. But this year has seen some major developments, and Ed Breault, VP, head of marketing, was the guy to tell me about them.
Front-of-mind was the recently completed full migration to the cloud. Aprimo’s solutions are now 100% based on Microsoft Azure. Turning into a SaaS company is a big deal.
Other recent developments revolve around Aprimo’s DAM offering, and a new AI component. Having acquired ADAM, the Belgian DAM software solution, back in March, in August it announced full migration of that service to the cloud, as well as integration with Aprimo’s marketing resource management capabilities. This month, it announced the addition of AI-powered auto-tagging of assets. Essentially, that means having machines automatically append meta-data to assets — and learn how to it better as they go. “It creates complex relationships between the assets,” Breault added, making for a “contextual experience for known customers.”
Another ongoing investment is “a big focus on our UE,” Breault said. The intention has been to “consumerize” interaction with the dashboard: really, to make the DAM interface “look like Pinterest,” as Breault told me. “It’s intuitive: It knows what you want to do next.” And there’s an acknowledgement that Aprimo is part of a much broader marketing tech eco-system for many customers. APIs are not only being built out, but also published, allowing developers to “build into Aprimo.”
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Here are a couple of other items floating in the humid ether.
- I recently took a deep dive into the live events space, and one of the vendors I spoke with, eTouches, just launched its Venue Sourcing solution, which integrates venue souring and booking, meeting registration, and an enterprise event calendar.
- We’re all familiar with online chatbots, but how about robotic assistance for human customer service agents? Pegasystems now has that covered with a line of task-specific deskbot robots, designed to help agents with mundane and repetitive tasks: Leaving them free to type, “Is there anything else I can help you with today?”
Stack logo by Hilary Allison
