The evolution of CRM, marketing automation, and customer management

Marketing automation systems have been designed from the get-go to act on a loose collection of varied signals that can be flexibly acted on. As a result, an increasing number of marketers are using marketing automation as their primary database for customer data management. CRM still dominates, but the nature and structure of customer data today is changing, becoming increasingly complex and unstructured. And that favors marketing automation.

http://venturebeat.com/2015/12/08/the-evolution-of-crm-marketing-automation-and-customer-management/