There’s A $10 Billion Opportunity As Marketing Hits The Big Time

Editor’s note: Ajay Agarwal is a managing director at Bain Capital Ventures in Palo Alto where he focuses on early-stage SaaS and mobile investing. 

Marketing is no longer the forgotten stepchild of enterprise software. Traditionally underserved and under-penetrated, marketing is finally receiving its fair share of attention by technologists, founders and investors alike. Gartner famously predicted CMOs would spend more on IT than CIOs by 2017. IDC estimates $32.4 billion in marketing technology spending by 2018, growing at 12.4 percent CAGR. Hundreds of new companies are emerging every year, and thanks to Scott Brinker, marketers now have their own dedicated technology conference.
Three years ago, I wrote a post that called marketing “the next big money sector in technology,” and predicted it will “give rise to several multi-billion-dollar companies.” At the time, Omniture had sold to Adobe for $1.8 billion but was the only marketing-focused technology company with an exit north of $1 billion. All other enterprise categories over the past 30 years have created several multi-billion-dollar software companies across functional application areas: SAP (manufacturing), Oracle (financials), PeopleSoft (HR), Siebel (sales) and Salesforce (sales/CRM).