Is Your MarTech Vendor a Zombie?

When the first dot-com bubble burst twenty-four years ago, Forbes published an excellent piece called “The Undead.” It profiled some struggling enterprise software vendors sitting on large piles of cash because they IPO’d at pumped-up valuations just before the 2001 crash. Most of them did end up burning through the rest of their cash and getting sold off, though it took a while for some of them to pass on.

I can't say whether we’re living through another tech bubble, but as a marketing technology evaluation firm, at Real Story Group we do see quite a few “zombie” vendors: not quite dead, but not fully alive either. As a tech customer and MarTech leader, you’ll want to be on the alert for zombies in your portfolio.

A new generation of zombies

Circa 2025, I see a new generation of undead tools and vendors. This time fewer of them bulge with IPO cash — although some are coasting on legacy VC investments. Rather there's a decent crop of MarTech vendors who have aged to a point where they subsist off one or both of two approaches:

1. Profitable maintenance streams (usually supporting legacy systems in environments where customers cannot easily switch out), while keeping R&D costs to a minimum.
2. SaaS-based models that sustain younger zombies who can more readily marginalize their expenses relative to revenues.

A big risk for your here is that legacy industry analyst firms typically lag in their vendor assessments and can stamp an imprimatur of vitality to an otherwise declining player. Oracle and IBM MarTech suites definitely got lauded way beyond their prime.

Perhaps the worst example of analyst zombie-pumping came with the Interwoven Web CMS suite—one of Forbes’s “undead” in 2002. Forrester and Gartner lauded the firm for more than a decade past its prime, even as licensees labored under mountains of technical debt. Most of the Interwoven portfolio still wheezes away at OpenText, its fourth domicile in twelve years.

Senior living options

OpenText itself is a kind of multi-tiered senior community for aging software platforms. It purchases older solutions, sets them up with independent apartments, then transitions them through assisted living, hospice care, and on to what the tech community quaintly calls “sunsetting.”

OpenText is not alone. This business model has also attracted the likes of Verint and Upland in the marketing tech / customer experience space. Typically these roll-up vendors purchase older toolsets on the cheap, cobble them into “solution bundles,” limit future development to bug fixes, and centralize back-office functions to reduce costs.

This model is great for investors, and in some cases, you the licensee as well. Any high-functioning community needs to deal with aging members. Just understand that — despite what a sales rep may tell you — the acquired zombie platform is not going to innovate substantially and will increasingly struggle to integrate with newer parts of your stack. At best, you sustain decent support.

Other models

Some zombies carry on solo. Consider the former IBM marketing technology portfolio now gamely trying to survive at Acoustic and HCL. Or Sitecore’s flagship “Experience Platform” web content management system, which has been given a three-year prognosis. I could list a dozen more. These are platforms you leave, not license afresh.

Meanwhile, some open source projects subsist on an “age-in-place” strategy, where their communities keep them alive, albeit not very active in the wider world.

And what about younger zombies? They’re out there, sometimes with structural problems hidden behind venture-boosted coffers. Tell-tale signs include declining volumes of new licensees, reduced headcounts, and higher-than-average churn rates. Even in the vibrant customer data platform market, where RSG evaluates nearly three-dozen platforms, some vendors have plateaued. Upland acquired CDP vendor BlueVenn, while Lytics got sold to a smallish headless CMS vendor for likely a pittance (more about that another post). We’ll see other zombies emerge in the next few years.

However, zombie vendor by definition tend not to disappear entirely, and this gives you time, typically measured in years, to adapt and respond.

What you should do

Most MarTech zombies aren’t lethal and are unlikely to eat your stack. Though left unaddressed, they can create an increasing drain on your resources—and staff morale.

So, when you identify a zombie in your stack, you typically need not rush to the exits, but you do need a replacement plan for the long run. One key consideration is where the solution fits in a "legless stack." If it’s a boutique engagement solution, perhaps adequate support is all you need right now while you focus MarTech innovation on more vibrant platforms.

On the other hand, for an anchor platform at your foundation layer, you’ll want to make active plans to replace any zombie. And under no circumstance should you license a zombie platform afresh for a new implementation. SaaS doesn't always mean modern, and breadth of customer base does not equal satisfaction of customer base. In particular I would argue that today's Adobe and Salesforce could become tomorrow's IBM and Oracle. Always do your diligence.

If your enterprise could benefit from an overall stack health assessment, just ping me directly here.

Meanwhile, what’s been your experience? Always welcome seeing your comments.