Marketing Industry Migrating to the Cloud

IBM announced today that it is seeing a growing adoption of IBM cloud services with a variety of its clients venturing into its enterprise marketing management services. IBM’s Global CIO Survey showed that 60 percent of chief information officers are preparing for cloud computing, which is double the interest level of two years ago.

"Companies are migrating to the cloud," observes Michelle Eichner, product management leader for IBM's enterprise marketing management group. "It really helps open up the opportunity for companies to take advantage of what they wouldn’t otherwise consider."

Eichner believes cloud solutions "save money and are more efficient." "Essentially every business could take advantage of it," she says. "The marketing community can go out and make decisions, sometimes without the IT department, and I think that's a plus because they can go out and purchase on-demand products that fit their needs without necessarily having to worry about other departments as well."

The study credits the growth in cloud computing's popularity to its ability to "control costs, provide widespread and easy access across geographics, and to house large amounts of data at low cost."

With the growing popularity of the cloud across the marketplace, privacy has been a recurring concern. Eichner acknowledges that some worries are in fact justified. "Certain things could potentially occur or there could be a little bit more risk when you've got the cloud as opposed to having things on premises," she says.

Despite the concerns, IBM plans to spend $20 billion in the next several years in acquisitions, according to Eichner. "From the company's perspective, it broadens our offering so somebody doesn't have to take something on-premises and gives them the flexibility to utilize software that they wouldn't otherwise have to purchase hardware for and have resources for," she explains. 

IBM Email Optimization solutions already enable marketers to determine the kind of email clients their customers are using, understand who is forwarding messages, and create more channels of engagements across platforms and campaigns.

"IBM's Email Optimization tools are helping us ensure every email we send is optimized to provide our clients with a consistent, properly formatted email experience, regardless of their ISP or platform," said Sammar Faraj, email marketing team leader at Quicken Loans, in a statement.  "In addition, delivery monitoring tools assure us that our emails are reaching our recipients' inboxes, and not being bulked or blocked, which is critical to our continued email marketing success." 

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