Forrester Research on two innovative European vendors

Peter O’Neill from Forrester Research, Inc. on two interesting European software vendors he spotted, from March 7, 2010:

“[…] I like that there are these European companies with some very innovative ideas that will contribute to the success of both factory and field marketers in the tech industry. But it is also their innovation that I find interesting.

Last week, Laura Ramos blogged on our view of the marketing technology landscape, split into six core applications areas. Looking at the graphic, we are also clearly documenting that the Enterprise Marketing Platform is in its very early days and that there is plenty of room, probably time as well, for emerging vendors to play a role here.

BizSphere positions itself as providing sales enablement solutions (my colleague Scott Santucci also knows them well) but they are actually filling a gap between a marketing asset management system and satisfying the needs of both sales people and field marketers. While central marketing people need an asset management system to maintain content integrity and oversight; their colleagues in the field also need a tool to help them collate the right collateral package matching every potential sales situation, most relevant to that target customer and status in the sales cycle.

BizSphere is headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany and their solutions are based on long term projects done for tech vendors. Their own marketing is, well, German, but the products are proven. See them for yourself, if interested, at the Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco this week.

Blue Kiwi is was a French vendor with already quite some market momentum. They offer the capability for enterprise marketers to aggregate information from various social networks onto one console. I expect that many field marketers will want to have their own versions of this software running to be able to watch activity in their local market. […]”