When Gartner analyst Laura McLennan made this bold statement in a Gartner report late last year, it attracted plenty of skeptical comment.

Increasingly, however, more and more people are lining up to endorse Laura’s view.

Marketing is now a major technology driver, as it becomes clear that marketing needs a marketing technology backbone in order to get anything constructive done.

CMOs and CIOs must accept the new reality that they need each other to deliver the cross-functional integration their customers and ultimately their shareholders demand today.

Tech Republic’s Steve Ranger sums up the challenges in this good blog post.

Steve quotes a recent Forrester Research report _ Business execs increase direct IT spend to support systems of engagement _ which claims that if IT doesn’t step up and engage, it will be relegated to “overseeing legacy systems”.

According to the report only 39 per cent of execs thought IT consistently delivered projects on time and on budget, something Forrester described as “the basic building block of IT’s credibility”.