| Every marketer has seen that crowded graphic of the marketing technology landscape, which gets set in smaller print every year as the number of vendor logos balloons, now, to over 8,000 and counting. “This explosion of software is happening everywhere,” said Scott Brinker, creator of the graphic and also Editor of chiefmartec.com and VP Platform Ecosystem for HubSpot. Brinker closed day one of MarTech with a keynote addressing this growth in software applications and the transition to digital-first operations that affects how all of us do our jobs. He cited an IDC Technologies prediction that there could be over 500 million digital apps and services deployed using cloud-native approaches by 2023. “Not all of these are going to be commercially packaged solutions you can buy off the shelf, although there will certainly be plenty — hundreds of thousands of SaaS applications,” Brinker said. “But there will be an even larger number of custom apps built within individual companies.” As any marketer can tell on a daily basis, the amount of data out there is proliferating. Of course, as discussed in the other Day 1 keynote, the data isn’t always perfect. But as data continues to grow, the applications to manage and activate it are growing even faster. “The thing about Big Ops is that it’s not just the data that’s growing, it’s the interactions that every single one of us as an individual is having per day with data,” Brinker said. “That’s actually growing even faster than the data in the world.” Read more here. | 