Brinker martech lumascape swells to more than 5000 players

The latest Scott Brinker marketing technology lumascape has been released and dubbed the “Martech 5000” for the rising number of vendors featured this year.

The seventh annual edition of the martech map features 5381 solutions, up 39 per cent year-on-year, from 4891 unique companies, also up 40 per cent over 2016. The lumascape is a lesson in growth rather than consolidation, with just 4.7 per cent of the solutions features in 2016 removed this year.

Commenting on the latest edition, Brinker described the distribution of marketing technology vendors as a “long tail”, with a small number of major providers, such as Adobe, Oracle, Marketo, Salesforce, IBM and HubSpot, followed by a trail of niche, vertical startups, innovators and specialists. Yet again, this year’s map suggests there are still plenty of products out there that are more glorified features than standalone suites, with more consolidation inevitable across the martech and adtech space.

Brinker also pointed out of the martech companies listed, there’s a significant discrepancy between size and scale. For example, only 6.9 per cent are enterprises, with more than 1000 employees or a public listing. Nearly half are investor-funded startups at any pre-exit stage (48.8 per cent), and 44.2 per cent are private businesses with fewer than 1000 staff and no funding data.

“Increasingly, the major providers are evolving into true platforms — serving as stable foundations that allow more specialised software to be easily plugged into them,” Brinker continued. “This reduces risk and cost for marketers to augment their marketing stacks with long-tail tools that best serve their particular needs.”

As a result, instead of choosing between a suite from a single vendor or a best-of-breed collection of products from multiple vendors, many marketers have the ability to take both a suite and best-of-breed approach to their marketing technology stack, Brinker said.

“They use the suites from major providers as general, centralised platforms to coordinate customer data and campaigns, while extending their capabilities with these highly-focused, long-tail tools,” he said.

The 2017 edition dwarfs those of previous years. In 2011, the year the lumascape was created, about 150 companies were featured, leaping to 350 in 2012 and more than 2000 by 2015.

At first glance, categories to have experienced the biggest growth over the past year with new solutions include display and programmatic advertising, marketing automation, content marketing, customer intelligence, audience data, social media marketing and mobile marketing.

The landscape was produced by Brinker, editor of chiefmartec.com and chair of the US MarTech conference, with Anand Thaker.

Click here to see the full lumascape

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