What's up with the Internet of Things, you almost surely didn’t ask yourself this morning.

Aprimo has gone through several evolutions but now positions itself as cloud-based marketing operations software. It just announced an expanded integration framework of APIs and Web hooks to simplify connections with other marketing management systems. This is emphatically not about customer data.  Instead, it’s about marketing processes such as planning, budgeting, project management, media buying, content creation, and measurement. The basic organizational unit is a marketing “activity” such as an email campaign or media buy. It’s useful to occasionally remind ourselves that marketers need more than customer data.

Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.