Gartner several years ago predicted that chief marketing officers (CMOs) would spend more on IT than CIOs by 2017. That day is almost here and, indeed, marketing organizations are proving to have an insatiable hunger for marketing technology and, in particular, analytics.
At Zeta Interactive, a self-described big data and analytics firm co-founded in 2007 by former Pepsi and Apple CEO John Sculley and David Steinberg, the CIO is hardly sitting on the sidelines.
According to a Business Insider profile, “Steinberg says he has chief information officer Jeffry Nimeroff focus on making sure that the company's technology is always able to handle Zeta's growth. By using a data-based growth strategy, Steinberg is able to avoid unnecessarily risky initiatives that the company may not be able to adapt to.”
Marketing cloud
Providing a marketing cloud platform in which clients from Ford to IKEA store their own data and utilize Zeta’s tools to acquire, track and retain customers, requires scale, flexibility and adaptability in an industry that is constantly in flux.
“Sometimes its not just about more or faster, its about different and better,” Nimeroff says. “We moved from the Hadoop environment to the Apache Spark environment as we saw the desire for less technical intervention and to have more capabilities within our team of subject matter experts or business users. They tell us what they want to solve, and we work with them to give them the best approach to how they should solve something from a technology perspective.”
Hadoop is still a key component of the Zeta infrastructure, providing a real-time information gathering source system for other Zeta platforms or technology. “But the new technologies like Storm, Spark, MemSQL, tend to strike a balance in how straightforward they are to stand up, how they lower the bar from a technology perspective so our data scientists become more self service,” he explains.
When it comes to handling the company’s growth, Nimeroff says his first premise is simple: “Have enough baseline capacity not just to handle the core footprint, but what you’ve seen historically from peaks and spikes.”
Leveraging Cloud
From a procurement perspective, he says, “We leverage cloud in a highly varied manner, but the decision point internally is around commoditization versus specialization.” With commodity infrastructure nodes such as core applications servers or web servers, he says, “We leverage the cloud to compress the procurement timeline down to nothing. We have the ability in the cloud to spin them up as needed, whenever we want.”
Proprietary analytics components are another story. “We still have to do lot of preplanning around those things we host on premise because those are our own specialty tools, they are our intellectual property so if something starts to perform in manner that we see unfit we try to get out in front to make sure we would be able to get any of the specialty equipment we would need to bring that back in line,” he explains.
With 1,000 employees and more than $200 million in revenue in 2015, Zeta is relatively mature in a still young industry segment, competing with a seemingly never-ending series of new contenders – in the third quarter of 2015, marketing analytics firms raised more than $1 billion in venture capital funding, with Zeta alone raking in $125 million – as well as older companies such as Oracle and Salesforce.
But, says Nimeroff, it’s “a market that people can still tap into” because conversion rates for marketing campaigns are so low, there is still tremendous upside for technology solutions.
