• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 12, 2012

Emeryville-based Lyris unveiled a digital marketing platform Tuesday resembling an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system built to support online advertising, part of an effort to rebuild and rebrand the company.

The transformation began two years ago after Wolfgang Maasberg stepped in as Lyris CEO. The company shuttered several products, reconfigured a global sales organization, and reduced the employee count from 292 employees to 165.  

Lyris ONE analyzes data gathered from structured and unstructured sources like social, email, mobile and hundreds of enterprise applications that power interactive marketing campaigns.  Creating a segment once took days after the database batched and marketers ran reports; the platform now allows marketers to create the segment while reviewing the data.

These days "the customer becomes the channel," said Alex Lustberg, VP of marketing at Lyris. It means consumers don't care what device they access information from, so marketers must connect all messages across screens to create a consistent experience.

The data collected through JavaScript tagging and a partnership built with data integration company Talend doesn't require the platform to identify the screen, but rather the behavior on the device.

As the marketing front office becomes the next frontier for enterprise software, building ERP  platforms for multichannel digital advertising and make the data available to marketers is an alternative to silos. "Marketers are a little afraid of owning data projects, but they need the information to target," Lustberg said.

A Corporate Executive Board study of nearly 800 marketers at Fortune 1000 companies found the majority of marketers still rely too much on intuition, with only 11% of customer-related decisions integrating data, cites Lyris. Today's campaigns are aided by integrating marketing analytics that help determine  the most profitable market segments.

Lyris One also automates email and social exchanges and SMS notifications for mobile and data feeds for display retargeting. It's unclear whether the company plans to build out campaign creation tools for display or take in data from an ad network.