Chief marketing officers at many enterprise firms have seen firsthand the explosion of technology tools and vendors.

When the marketing blog Chiefmartec compiled its first graphic in 2011 to chart the martech landscape, the image showed 150 companies. Today, the most recent version lists close to 7,000 vendors.

For Micheline Nijmeh (pictured), chief marketing officer of Zscaler Inc., the explosion of new tools has not always been a good thing.

“There’s data that shows almost 30% of marketers have 11 to 20 tools, and that’s crazy,” Nijmeh said. “If you don’t have them integrated, if you don’t have them working and talking to each other, then they’re going to be a hindrance more than help to a marketer.”

Nijmeh spoke with Peter Burris (@plburris), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, in Palo Alto, California. They discussed the importance of leveraging new technologies to better understand the customer and the challenges and benefits of meeting compliance requirements governing user data (see the full interview with transcript here).

Keeping the customer connection

As the CMO for Zscaler, a global cloud-based information security company, Nijmeh must cope with the demands of digital transformation and its impact on marketing. The expansion of martech tools has required Nijmeh and her counterparts to embrace automation and data management without losing site of the main mission: cultivating and retaining customers.

The key to effectively using this technology, according to Nijmeh, is to run the marketing organization with the minimum number of manual steps necessary while using data to keep a strong connection with the customer.

“It’s going to help me understand my customer better because I’m going to have the data,” Nijmeh said. “It’s not moving away from the human connection. It’s enabling you to have a better human connection.”

Having a better human connection also means protecting the privacy of user data. New rules and compliance requirements, such as the General Data Protection Regulation in Europe, have forced enterprise marketers to recalibrate not just handling of data, but the use of it to deliver customer value.

“GDPR, when you first heard about it and when it first came out, it was a beast,” Nijmeh said. “As a consumer, I love it. As a marketer, as challenging as it has been, it’s really helped us reset.”

Watch the video interview with Nijmeh below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations.

Photo: SiliconANGLE