Enterprise marketing automation are three of the hottest buzzwords on the lips of the venture capital community and one of the best EMA prospects, Rubric Inc, has introduced its first product called Rubric EMA 1.0. The internet has enabled ISVs to write programs to automate marketing tasks – which may currently be widely-spread, ad hoc and paper-based – and integrate those processes directly into organization’s sales force automation programs and other corporate information sources. Its adherents say it effectively closes the loop between sales and marketing, enabling the output from marketing programs to feed back directly into the sales programs which drive customer services and customer care schemes, and which in turn provide impetus for new marketing initiatives. Rubric says its EMA system measures the impact of marketing activities by tracking marketing dollars spent against generated revenue. Current EMA solutions are mainly point solutions such as data mining for call centers, report writers and direct mail programs, it says. Indeed it shares a building with DataMind Corp, the data mining company that’s now trying to hang its hat on EMA.
Desperate
Rubric’s key intellectual property is its all-Java workflow and rules engine and its push technology messaging system. With it Rubric says customers can open up a fourth marketing channel after direct, indirect and retail: the web. It quotes various studies which supposedly claims that on average a company could make between 5% and 15% of its annual revenue from web sales and that at least 70% of current web sites are used for marketing purposes. EMA is to sales force automation (SFA) what supply chain software and SFA is to automated enterprise resource planning (human resources, manufacturing and financial) applications. That’s why the likes of Siebel-Scopus, Vantive, Clarify and Remedy are so desperate to build or buy into EMA. Rubric, which claims it would take 18 months to build an equivalent product expects to strike reseller and OEM agreements with some of them as it’s not about to sell up. It expects to announce an OEM agreement with Siebel Systems within a month. Siebel’s existing EMA solution is said to be a kludge which does not automate marketing processes. Rubric VP marketing Hal Steger points to his former employer Compuware Corp’s Saratoga leads database, which was used by all of the automated sales processes utilized, but few of its marketing programs. It spent $10m a year buying leads but the sales people threw out whatever they didn’t use. Rubric says its lead mining facility enables a company to get full value from its leads purchases by creating continuous and automated marketing leads. Intel Corp, by comparison, tracks its 300,000-odd marketing partners and programs on an ad hoc client/server systems that won’t be linked to the internet until later this year. Intel spends up to $200m on its marketing programs and receives around 200 partner proposals each day. Rubric says future functionality it is developing will enable customers to better manage co-operative marketing programs and utilize finer grain tools.
Price up
EMA took $5.1m in a first round of VC funding from Brentwood Venture Capital, Menlo Ventures and the Cambridge Capital Fund associated with integrator Cambridge Technology Partners which resells its software. Rubric will seek a multiple of that $5.1m in a further round but says it’s hardly touched the first round of dollars yet. The investors will likely bring in one other partner for that round to enable them to price up the value of the company. It counts its closest rival as Market First. It says Epiphany Intelligence Software – nee Epiphany Marketing Software – is heading to business information analysis while Exchange Applications’ ValEX – which is resold by Scopus – is really and direct marketing/direct mail system. On NT now or Solaris by June with MS SQL Server or Oracle, Rubric EMA 1.0 costs $150,000 per server for a base system to $220,000 for a complete solution.
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