Chief marketing officers (CMOs) are not exactly what you may equate with information technology. Chances are, you’re likely to think that chief information officers (CIOs) are synonymous with IT given their titles, however, it looks like CMOs are taking on more IT responsibility.

If it doesn’t seem to make sense, consider the facts and the era we’re in; the cloud as we know it is changing the technology landscape, so much that a lot of it is focused on how companies deal with the customer through customer connections and the multichannel integration with social media. These are the tools of the CMO, whose primary responsibility focuses on marketing communications and customer service. What once was the role of the CIO has no metamorphosed into the role of the CMO.

Gartner analyst Laura McLellan predicted that by 2017, CMOs will spend more on IT than their counterpart CIOs. Per the webinar, data backs up this prediction, saying that 30 percent of named marketing-related technology and services is bought by marketing already. What’s more, marketing now influences almost half of all purchases.

Many of the biggest trends in business today are big data, mobile, social, cloud and mobile commerce. All of these should be on the radar of the CMO and have IT implications, often significant ones, so the prediction holds a lot of weight.

With the cloud, Interactive Voice Response (IVR) provider Angel believes that CMOs can best be supported through better customer connections and getting stronger analytics in the cloud. There is a lot of data involved today that crosses over to marketing, and with social media becoming important tools for CMOs to use, multichannel integration and how to best connect with the customer is the key to success.

The prediction/argument that McLellan has set forth isn’t about marketing itself. It’s about customer interactions and how they are now being digitized through various platforms, from social media to mobile apps. It really isn’t about whether marketing is taking over for IT, it’s about changing the function of the two departments, even comingling some of the responsibility as the backdrop of customer interaction changes.

Marketing, technology and customer experience must co-exist for companies to thrive. Is it really changing hands from CIO to CMO or will both play an active role in IT?