Adobe, Evergage lead latest Forrester Digital Intelligence Platform wave

Adobe and Evergage have topped the latest Forrester Wave rating digital intelligence platform providers based on product offering, strategy and market presence.

The Q4 Digital Intelligence Platform report placed both Adobe and Evergage in the leaders’ quadrant out a total field of nine vendors.

In its commentary, the analyst firm highlighted Adobe’s best-of-breed capabilities and scale as key reasons for its leadership position, noting the core components of Adobe Analytics, Experience Platform and Adobe Target as providing a wide array of services for marketing and customer engagement. Specifically, these address data, analytics and experience optimisation and are also well integrated into a wider platform play, Forrester stated.

Second in the pack was smaller player, Evergage, which Forrester praised for its all-in-one, tightly integrated offering. The vendor’s technology is designed to identify, understand, decide and engage with customers on a one-to-one basis across major and emerging digital channels.

In particular, Forrester highlighted Evergage’s investment into artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, along with usability and connectivity with third-party systems, features which have seen the vendor leap up the Forrester Wave this year. According to the analyst first, Evergage’s greatest strengths lie in the integration of its customer interaction data model, with capabilities for experience testing, recommendations and behavioural targeting.

Across the rest of the Digital Intelligence Platform wave, vendors falling into the ‘strong performers’ category included SAS and Acoustic. Forrester marked up SAS’s Customer Intelligence 360 platform for its strong profile data management and analytics support for enterprise-scale needs, highlighting advanced digital analytics capabilities and particular strengths in social and Internet of Things analytics.

On the downside, Forrester noted SAS’s platform was not plug-and-play and less user-friendly.

Acoustic (formerly IBM’s marketing software business) was also in the strong performers quadrant for its combination of Experience Analytics, Journey Analytics, Digital Analytics and Personalisation software offerings. According to Forrester, Acoustic’s strength is in its breadth of analytics capabilities, particularly in customer journey, interaction and Web analytics. Weaknesses include experience optimisation techniques for testing and behavioural targeting as well as overall platform experience.

Other contenders featured in the latest quarterly report are Oracle, Mixpanel, Sitecore, Google and Cxense.  

The Forrester report was based on evaluating vendors against 23 criteria across current offering, including management of first-party interaction profile data and Web analytics functionality; strategy including execution roadmap, partner ecosystem, performance, vision and supporting services; and market presence. All vendors listed earned at least US$16 million from these platform offerings in the last year.

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