“Marketing technology and operations is the heartbeat of modern marketing”, writes Scott Brinker, Editor of chiefmartech.com and VP Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot. But what exactly is MarTech, and why does it matter to Elanco?
The phrase ‘MarTech’ is an amalgamation of the words Marketing and Technology. It typically applies to major initiatives, efforts and tools that harness technology to achieve marketing goals and objectives. Today, virtually anyone involved with digital marketing is dealing with MarTech, since digital by its very nature is technologically-based.
The Marketing Technology Landscape is a complex one. The number of Marketing Technology solutions continues to grow; now standing at approximately 7000, a 27% growth in a single year. There is not a single solution that can meet all needs - indeed the concept of microservices and APIs are embraced in the digital world and regarded as one of the biggest disrupters to marketing (note: that’s marketing at large, not just ‘digital’ marketing!).
The application of IT Architecture principles are crucial to navigate this rapidly evolving landscape in Elanco. There are four business objectives that Elanco Digital IT Architecture attempts to meet:
1) Increase the compliance of our digital solutions
2) Reduce cycle time; allowing digital tactics to get to market quicker
3) Reduce the cost of digital
4) Enhance the customer experience
Elanco Digital IT is embracing the microservice architecture principles. In December 2017, Elanco Digital IT migrated from our legacy, monolithic architecture to embrace a microservice architecture based on Heroku, Contentful and GitHub. Not only does this save approximately $400,000 in platform costs alone, but now this solid foundation is in place further advantages can be gained.
Continuous improvements are now being made to the Elanco Digital Pipeline. Improvements made in Q1 of 2018 include automating the set-up of environments and SSL Certificates, mandating code quality and vulnerability scans on each code deploy, and launching application logging and monitoring software. As a result, creating a new website in Elanco is faster and with higher quality code. By introducing these enhancements as part of our Digital Pipeline, each website created at Elanco has a saving of $20,000 (direct and indirect costs) compared to an equivalent externally hosted site.
MarTech continues to evolve rapidly. Being able to navigate this space, respond quickly and implement enhancements to our own MarTech landscape is critical to Elanco’s success.
| Questions? Contact Rhys Williams, Consultant, Portfolio & Architecture | Elanco Global Digital IT |