This article ( https://finance.yahoo.com/news/salesforce-positioned-leaders-quadrant-gartners-140000324.html)">https://finance.yahoo.com/news/sale... popped up in my news feed this morning and it took my back to the spring of 2011. I was doing a lot of architecture work at @ExactTarget then and @smccorkle keep telling me that I needed to start building the Interactive Marketing Hub...

The problem was I had no idea what he was talking about - it turns out that most visionary& #39;s don& #39;t happen to have a Google docs or JIRA tickets to accompany their vision. I knew my friend @JasonDay_UX would eventually save me, but I needed to start building something.

I think we nailed down a couple of things for the UI - the hub needed to be 1) centered on the customer 2) showcase multichannel 3) be real-time. #2 was actually a pretty big challenge at the time because none of our channel apps were designed to talk to one another.

So we started building some stuff out, got a first demo going, eventually some more engineers joined the team, and we had a successful launch at Connections in the fall: https://www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/CRM-News/Daily-News/ExactTarget-Launches-New-Interactive-Marketing-Hub--77672.aspx">https://www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/...

Of course, the engineering team& #39;s part was just a small piece of how this thing became an entire software category. Having spent the past couple years in a new, innovative market has added to level of respect I have for the ET marketing crew (cc @tbkopp)