Steve Lucas, who joined Marketo Inc. as chief executive in October, thinks one new macro-event that could help kick the martech roll-up into high gear: a new U.S. president Jan. 21. Donald Trump has vowed to change tax laws to make tens of billions of dollars held overseas by U.S. tech companies more attractive to bring back home. “When you see this repatriation of cash coming in under the Trump presidency, you’re going to see significant growth in M&A,” Lucas said.

But that’s not the main reason he predicts rampant consolidation, which could come across information technology. Mainly, marketers are looking to reach consumers in a more personalized way, but do it at massive scale in real time. Of course, since Marketo’s key selling point is that it can offer a single view of customers at a scale of millions of consumers, and Lucas is looking to make Marketo one of the key consolidators, his comments can be seen as self-serving.

Nonetheless, he also may be right. It’s clear that marketers are looking for more intimate engagements with consumers. “Marketers need to engage with millions of people in a personalized manner at scale,” Lucas said. “It’s go digital or die.”

• Fragmented landscape ripe for consolidation. Adobe, Google, IBM, Oracle and Salesforce have the highest number of installations in place across nearly a quarter of the categories of martech in the survey. However, some categories — mobile marketing analytics, data visualization, SEM/SEO tools, ad verification services, and retargeting — have no reported deployments completed or underway from the big five. 
• Marketers are moving quickly from the basics to sophisticated tools. More than half of the respondents have deployed the martech staples — web analytics, web content management and email marketing top the list followed by survey/customer insight tools, data management platforms and content marketing platforms not far behind. 
• Adtech and martech converge in the most advanced organisations. Advanced marketers use more specialised technologies that deliver improved insights and business results through increased data use.

The potential of a vertically-connected ecosystem in the digital channel is what makes Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn so powerful. Although Microsoft has already had positions in all three stages of this channel, their primary strength was in client software (Windows, Xbox, Internet Explorer) and their secondary strength was in marketing software (Dynamics CRM, Office, Cortana). Their Internet services were a distant third, as Bing struggled against Google Search. They had no dominant exchange social media property.

Acquiring LinkedIn changes that. It will give Microsoft a very strong Internet service that is the dominant exchange of professional social networking. They will have star offerings in all three stages.

So what are the advantages of owning a vertically connected ecosystem? Here are a few:

• The relative redistribution of marketing spend across the different stages of the channel matters less if you’re earning revenue from all of them — in other words, vertical competition within your portfolio doesn’t harm you.
• You can leverage your products in one stage to boost the reach and value of your products in other stages (some regulation may apply). 
• The end-to-end visibility of prospects and customers across their client software, your Internet services, and marketers’ engagements with them through marketing software offers a much richer picture of customer insights.