Notable Year
Oracle's dive into the marketing arena in 2012 has ticked off a year of acquisitions, most notably resulting in a competition with its major competitor, Salesforce.
"It's almost like an 'every time you get one, I have to get my own,'" Rebecca Lieb, an analyst at Altimeter Group told CMSWire.
The deal is noteworthy because CRM oriented companies are now moving aggressively into the marketing space, two worlds that had been decoupled for a long time, she said. "A big part of this is the trend toward big data, and the ability to derive insights on trends across the buyer lifecycle. We haven't seen the end of these acquisitions."
Oracle recently acquired a company called Compendium, a content marketing tool that is being rolled into the Eloqua Marketing Cloud. Responsys is destined for the same fate. Oracle sees Responsys as a clear B2C marketing tool, where Eloqua is focused on B2B customers. As Lieb mentioned, the back and forth buying cycle between Oracle and Salesforce plays out in this scenario.
Salesforce bought ExactTarget in mid 2012 in response to the Eloqua buy. That move came less than a year after ExactTarget itself had bought up B2B marketing automation vendor Pardot. Now both Oracle and Salesforce have marketing systems that are expressly designed for either B2B or B2C customers. Oracle President Mark Hurd said as much in a statement by pointing out B2B and B2C have unique needs.
Responsys Interact monitors and distributes campaigns, much like Eloqua. It seems likely the two will remain separate for now, similar to how Salesforce markets Pardot and ExactTarget.
What It Means
The deal is bad news for Salesforce and Marketo, Responsys founder and now Act-On CEO Raghu Raghavan said in an email. "On the B2C side, Oracle/Responsys is (and always has been) clearly superior to Salesforce/Exact Target, and on the B2B side, Oracle/Eloqua easily trumps Salesforce/Pardot," he said.
But Robert Brosnan, principal analyst at Forrester, disagreed. "My take is that Oracle's deal helps it answer questions about it's ability to stay relevant against Salesforce. I expect most marketers to shrug," he said in an email.
Marketers have big challenges that are separate from other corporate functions, Bronsan said
"Because of the breadth of those challenges, an enterprise wide suite — covering sales, service, and marketing — doesn't provide much relevance for the big spenders: enterprise B2C marketers."
It's far too early to see whether marketing will drive long term valuation and revenue for the following reasons, Bronsan said.
- Front office corporate functions, especially marketing, control more and more tech spend,
- Media digitizes and drives the growth in data and analytics, and
- Enterprise tech continues to move towards software-as-a-service
Nevertheless, Oracle will aggressively invest in its Marketing Cloud going forward, according to a statement, but the buying of other companies is just the beginning. "Buying them is one thing, but integrating them is another," Lieb said. "We've seen that time and time again."
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Source : cmswire[dot]com
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