5 Ways DaaS is Changing The Way Marketers Think About Data

Jim Fowler, Chief Executive Officer, Jigsaw

Data as a Service (DaaS) will do for the data business what Software as a Service (SaaS) has done for software. Ten years ago, every organization with a CRM solution was essentially in the business of procuring and managing software to run it.

The advent of SaaS spared them the expense and the hassle. Today, anyone in the demand gen business is in a similar boat, stuck procuring and managing the records that comprise their database. But just as a wave of innovation around SaaS transformed the software industry, DaaS is poised to transform data in much the same way.

While the role of data has long been important, Tim O’Reilly was the first to postulate, “Data is the next Intel Inside,” that is, that data will in fact become more important than software. The race is already on, with software companies vying to own core areas of data like mapping, identity, and calendaring. Data, O’Reilly wrote, has become the “Sole source component in systems whose software infrastructure is largely open source or otherwise commodified.”

DaaS is the concept that data procurement and management (hygiene) gets bought as a service. Think per seat versus per record. Market leading offerings do two things:

- Allow unlimited access to huge and dynamic databases (goodbye procurement problems)

- Perform daily cloud based cleaning of records (goodbye management problems)

As DaaS continues to gain traction, the way we think about data hygiene will change. Here are the five major changes:

1. Company and contact records will become commodities and cease being a competitive advantage and more and more data companies will start giving away records for free.
2. Companies will earn money by managing change in the records rather than selling the raw data
3. Commoditization of the basic records will mean that more messages get sent to buyers because more people will have access to them.
4. This transparency will force companies to become better marketers.
5. Multichannel marketing will become a requirement (not just practiced buy marketing elite)

DaaS will bring on a wave of innovation in the data industry in exactly the same way SaaS fundamentally changed the nature of the software industry. With DaaS, companies will no longer spend time procuring and managing the records that comprise their database, and will have more time to focus on their business.

As Chief Executive Officer, Jim Fowler provides direction and leadership toward the achievement of goals and objectives at Jigsaw. A veteran sales executive, Jim has more than 12 years selling software for marketing and collaboration applications. Before starting Jigsaw, Jim served as VP of Sales at Digital Impact (DIGI), Paramark and TightLink. In these roles, he built sales departments from the ground up focusing on sales strategies and processes. He was able to leverage his experience as an outstanding sales manager at Personify and NetGravity.