Scott Brinker published his 2019 Chief Martech eye chart and it now spans 7,040 companies, up 211 since last year.  While the industry continues to grow, the rate of growth appears to have moderated.  Between 2014 and 2018, the industry was adding over 1,000 companies each year with the biggest jump for the 2018 chart (1,800).  

The super-graphic is available to the public and may be reprinted at up to 1600 x 900.  Brinker has also made a spreadsheet available.

“That’s not so much a slowing down as a flattening out, a plateau,” said Brinker.  “At face value, it would seem that, indeed, we have achieved ‘peak martech.’ (pause for dramatic effect)”

While industry growth may have plateaued, Brinker admitted that 7,040 significantly underestimates the total number of Martech firms and joked that he may have hit “peak martech landscape.”  Brinker noted five areas where his chart is underweighted:

• Regionally – When comparing to national MarTech landscapes, Brinker spotted hundreds of companies on the UK, Canadian, Chinese, German, Swedish, and Finnish country charts that were absent on the 2019 Chief Martech chart.
• Vertical – Likewise, verticalized solutions are also underrepresented.
• Apps built for specific MarTech platform ecosystems
• Apps built by services companies (but packaged as products)
• Apps built with low-code/no-code citizen developer platforms

“Each of these trends — the growth of platform ecosystems, the blending of software and services businesses, and the rise of citizen developer platforms — are birthing whole new galaxies of martech apps.

The major marketing suites have all embraced becoming true marketing platforms, with ever more open APIs and official marketplaces for third-party apps.”

Brinker lists Salesforce, Oracle, Adobe, Microsoft, and G Suite amongst the platform ecosystems, but one would also include browser extensions, mobile apps, and sales engagement platforms (technically, SalesTech, but there is a fair amount of overlap between MarTech and SalesTech these days) to the list.  Brinker noted that WordPress has 54,480 plugins.

Many of the DaaS and Sales Intelligence vendors covered in this newsletter are amongst the 204 vendors listed in the Audience / Marketing Data & Data Enrichment category and the 457 vendors listed in the Sales Automation Enablement & Intelligence grouping.