Good morning Marketer, how many of your marketing tools are open source?
Love it or hate it, open source development isn’t going anywhere – and it has a growing role to play in the future of marketing technology. One of the key benefits is it doesn’t rely on one single individual or small team to solve problems. “For enterprises looking to build new platforms, they want to have access to a worldwide community that can crowd-source innovation, and can future-proof their platforms by ensuring that they’re extensible and can integrate with everything in their tech stack,” said Kevin Cochrane, Acquia’s SVP of Product Marketing.
But there are other benefits, too – like how open source development ensures that data, AI, and machine learning models can be shared more broadly, and improved upon by the community of developers at large. But even with the apparent benefits of open source martech, why are there still so few martech vendors who put it at the core of their offering?
Cochrane offered a personal viewpoint: “I think the problem is a very simple one. There has been a raft of investment from the venture community in new tools, designed to capture CMO spend. This spun up a lot of companies solving very specific aspects of the CMO’s problems. Each of those companies actually built their stack on open source, but they did so in a closed way, because they were looking to get to market quickly and fix some pain point.” What has yet to happen, said Cochrane, is an initiative to spur wider adoption across the industry. “We need to recognize it’s time to bring this community together.”
Take care,
Taylor Peterson,
Deputy Editor
