Even though big data, and to a lesser extent predictive analytics, are topics that have been overhyped, there is little argument that both are fueling a sea change in, of all places, enterprise marketing.  The new challenges facing the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) are at the core of the change:  building better customer relationships, managing game-changing factors such as social networks, mobile access and the utilization of big data to measure any and all marketing efforts.

As a result, some industry analysts such as Gartner Group are predicting that CMOs will increasingly make technology purchase decisions.  As more CMOs are tasked with ensuring that technology purchases align with revenue-driving initiatives, a new class of service providers will emerge: people that understand and can integrate technology and marketing.

Obviously, the days are gone when a CMO could spend millions on an ad campaign and not have to answer the ROI question.  With growing budgets comes the responsibility to report results. The ability to infer a cause of a sale is one of the most — if not the most — valid methodology for determining the value of any marketing campaign.  Knowing which marketing channel contributed more to revenue is one area where quantitative methods and big data can provide the answer.

Against this backdrop, Gartner maps out the future of the marketing technology ecosystem with both traditional players and an emergent set of new participants that appeal to the CMO/IT purchaser by offering an understanding of marketing and technology.

So what type of technology will the CMO/IT purchaser most likely acquire?  Big data and analytics play key roles in all of the major players.  Gartner’s Laura McLellan, who has predicted that the CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO by 2017, points to CRM, digital marketing and database marketing technologies, customer analytics and mobile marketing technologies as a few of the solutions that will surge in popularity.

The emergent class of marketing business service brokers will provide many of the above marketing services, in part or in whole, and may offer services in the cloud as well.  Solutions will also look beyond structured data (relational databases, spreadsheets, etc.) and unstructured data (tweets, online posts, reviews, and even video, image and audio).

Going forward, as buyers, CMOs will need to understand what service providers and integrators offer.   Service brokers will need to consider the risks versus rewards: staying with business as usual and bypassing internal IT to get to the business buyer, or acting as a bridge between the CMO and CIO.