One of the first questions I asked when I joined Percussion a couple of months ago was “Who buys our software?” Are they in marketing, IT, both, or some other organization? I have a long list of content to develop, and that is a fundamental question that I need to answer in order to provide the content our customers and sales team need.

Recently I listened to a Gartner webinar titled “By 2017 the CMO will Spend More on IT than the CIO” which directly addressed all of those questions. Presented by Laura McClellan, Gartner’s VP of Marketing Strategy, the webinar was an overview of the current landscape for marketing-related technology and services, and the “buying center” shift from IT to Marketing.

According to McLellan, marketing is firmly in control of the selection and management of marketing technology, from the initial “Determining if you have a need” through evaluation and selection. She shared some interesting data that lays it out pretty clearly.

The other question that immediately follows “Who is the buyer?” is “Who controls the budget?”  In the past, technology was installed and run on company-owned servers, with IT responsible for management, support, and maintenance, so it logically followed that it was funded out of IT budgets. McLellan’s data shows that this is still the case today for “behind the firewall” or on-premise technology, but the growing number of SaaS and cloud based marketing technology apps has shifted the budget ownership to marketing.

This trend will continue as the number of hosted/cloud based applications grows. Marketing has always funded its own outsourced projects, such as PR, design, and advertising, so it makes sense that they will take advantage of hosted technology to by-pass IT and manage their own tools, using their budget to buy the technology they need.

Key points:

• The strategy, sourcing, evaluation and selection of marketing technology is predominately led by marketing organizations
• Marketing budgets control close to half the marketing technology purchases - as opposed to the It budgets of the past - and that percentage is expected to increase over the next 5 years
• Availability of SaaS and cloud-based technology is enabling marketing to by-pass IT and acquire and manage the tools they need

This data gels with what we are finding at Percussion – in the past few years we have seen a dramatic shift in the role of marketing in the buying cycle. With that shift, comes a change in the buyer’s product requirements and expectations. Not surprisingly then, they are not as technical, and don’t really want to be technical.  This means that if marketing places a higher priority on usability and easy-to-use functionality that is available right “out of the box” our challenge is to deliver a user experience that matches that expectation.

It will be interesting to see how this trend plays out in 2012, and if IT is really ready to give up control over the application infrastructure. Stay tuned!

@megtemple