As the world gets more and more digitized, and technology touches every aspect of our lives, one evolution that is consistent across all segments of lives is software driven automation of work steps. Whether it’s in the connected home or connected work place or intelligent manufacturing processes or financial management, business automation is here to stay, and will only increase with time. Within this fundamental change the most recent evolution has been in the area of automated channel marketing software.

So why is the category of channel marketing software growing and why is it needed? And, who should consider deploying it? Before we answer these questions in detail, let’s look at the underlying factors that are driving the evolution of this new category.

Over the past two decades, the Internet has become not only a medium for content distribution, but also a utility that - just like electricity, water, air conditioning or heating - keeps an organization running. Today the Internet is a utility that allows businesses to distribute content and people to communicate, but it also has become a medium for distributing software that automates business workflow. Software that used to run on our desktop, gradually moved to centralized servers and, over the past decade, outside the organization to the cloud. This trend accelerated due to the abundance of bandwidth and storage and the evolution of web services platforms that can run software in the cloud, eliminating the need to install programs onsite.

A brief summary of the evolution of enterprise automation software looks like this:

* Phase 1 (Broad Enterprise Automation)- The first category of enterprise automation software has been in the area of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), which included Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Manufacturing Resource Management, Financial Resource Management, etc. This is where companies like SAP, Microsoft, Oracle and IBM have created technologies, and continue to dominate end-to-end automation and management of business processes. In this phase we also saw the evolution of Business Intelligence software that pulls data together from multiple systems to give a holistic view of the enterprise, with the goal here of enabling data-driven management decision-making and resource allocation.

* Phase 2 (More Deeper and More Specialized Tools)- During the past decade, we have seen the evolution of marketing automation software designed for the mid-market and enterprise space from players like Eloqua (acquired by Oracle), Pardot and ExactTarget (both acquired by Salesforce.com), Marketo, Hubspot, Act-On Software and many more. Most of these organizations today boast multi-billion valuations representing the future potential of growth in their respective segments. There also has been innovation in small business marketing automation areas - driven by players like ConstantContact and Vertical Response. As a result, it is now accepted that when it comes to core business processes like sales, marketing, manufacturing and finance, automation is critical not only to reduce cost, increase repeatability and reproducibility, but also to create competitive advantage against other players in the market place.

Amazon is first a software company, and secondarily a reseller of products and services. We have seen business like bookstores – for example Borders in the U.S. – going out of business, simply because they did not compete in the arena of digitized content and distribution of goods and services via Internet process automation. The same thing is happening with all companies that are not adopting digital sales and marketing processes using end-to-end automation, and the same logic applies to the recent evolution of automated channel marketing software. If you are selling direct, the chances are you have already automated your sales and marketing processes,