SHIFT takes on Salesforce with its Open Marketing Cloud, consisting of 12 ‘best in class’ apps

SHIFT, a collaboration platform for marketers and agencies, has announced the creation of a new service to take on Salesforce. Called the Open Marketing Cloud, it’s a suite of what it calls “best-in-class marketing technologies” with 12 enterprise applications. The idea is that companies will have a single platform and app ecosystem where they can manage, execute, and collaborate to create a sound marketing plan.

We spoke with SHIFT CEO James Borow who tells us that this new product suite takes each of the 12 applications and integrates them together with his platform. Doing this enables users to access, collaborate, and share data with people they are working with at any given time.

In this marketing suite, SHIFT users can utilize the following apps: Aggregate Knowledge, Convertro, Curalate, Expion, Fan Appz, Kenshoo, Moontoast, Offerpop, Optimal, Inc., SocialFlow, The Trade Desk, and GraphEffect.

Borow tells us:

The industry’s current marketing clouds can’t keep up with the rapid pace of software innovation and this forces people to work in silos, leaving marketers with a rigid set of tools that only meet some of their needs. Our mission is to build an ecosystem where marketers can work together, using the best tools to meet their goals. We created the SHIFT Open Marketing Coud to provide the most comprehensive and collaborative marketplace, where the leading apps are always available.

Borow says that customers will not have to pay anything to use this new service, although each application has its own cost to use. While there are currently 12 applications, SHIFT will be adding more each quarter. It tells us that its goal is to provide users with access to the best apps in the market today to help in the collaboration, management, and execution part of their marketing plans.

But wait, this is all well and good, but doesn’t Salesforce also have a Marketing Cloud service, comprised of Buddy Media and Radian6? Yes, but Borow says that because the digital marketing industry moves quickly, technology also needs to keep the same pace. He feels that SHIFT’s solution allows users to access the “most innovative technology available” instead of being forced to use the tools that the “other marketing clouds acquire.”

This news is perhaps welcome to SHIFT’s growing customer base. Borow says that 10 of the top 20 Fortune 500 companies have signed up to use its platform, adding to its more than 300 businesses it counts as customers.

Photo credit: NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images