What company is next on Oracle’s acquisition list following its recent $1.5 billion purchase of marketing cloud vendor Responsys?
It has some company in mind. And the next buy will come sooner rather than later for the Redwood City, Calif.-based software giant, analysts told CMSWire. “Marketing will be an extremely rich area of merger and acquisition activity for the foreseeable future,” said Robert Brosnan, principal analyst at Forrester.
An Acquisition World
Oracle’s latest acquisition comes during a time of industry transformation. Multiple forces are converging: advertising and media, data and analytics, and consumer empowerment through technology, Brosnan said.
“These changes will continue unabated,” he added. “Even with all the consolidation over the last several years, there is plenty of room for investors and entrepreneurs to create marketing tech products” that will need to be acquired.
The digital marketing hub will include competitors in a game of “inches as opposed to miles,” said Julie Hopkins, research director of Gartner for Marketing Leaders.
“The spotlight remains on other providers of email marketing and marketing automation solutions — folks like Marketo and Silverpop — but also on some of the providers of targeted solutions in this space,” Hopkins told CMSWire. “Functional gaps still exist for Oracle, but also for other players knitting together a Digital Marketing Hub solution.”
The industry’s attention, she added, will likely turn toward providers in tag management, analytics or PPC bid management — “all areas known to be gaps for Oracle and others.”
What Responsys Does for Oracle
While the digital marketing world outside of Oracle/Responsys will feel the tremors of the deal, there are other issues to consider. For one, Oracle now has digital marketing capabilities in line with Salesforce, which made a $2.5 billion acquisition of ExactTarget last summer.
ExactTarget fit well into the Salesforce Marketing Cloud alongside earlier Salesforce scoop-ups BuddyMedia, Radian6 and Social.com. It allowed Salesforce to offer end-to-end digital marketing capabilities that integrate fully with all of the Salesforce CRM offerings.
If you recall, ExactTarget acquired Pardot in 2012 to add small business marketing automation capabilities to its own platform. That now gives Salesforce the ability address any-size business.
Oracle and Salesforce both now offer B2C digital marketing — primarily email, but also SMS, push and web — in addition to B2B automation, social campaigns and social listening.
It makes the two companies unique, Forrester's Brosnan said. Adobe focuses more on an end-to-end B2C digital marketing story, from acquisition to retention to analysis. IBM and Teradata are less focused, he said, on digital than on more traditional enterprise marketing management.
Oracle’s acquisitions in the past year address its core needs as a digital marketing hub provider, Gartner’s Hopkins added. It is signaling to the market and to those seeking a solution that it is committed to pulling together key functionality.
However, Hopkins cautioned, Oracle’s solution still has “functional gaps and differs in its strengths from others in the market.”
“The company has covered a lot of ground and its progress is consistent," she said. "This makes it a lead horse in the race, though integration and delivery will determine the eventual winners.”
Responsys and B2C
Responsys, though it offers multichannel orchestration capabilities, has built the core of its business around B2C email.
“B2C email programs often are based around the integration of diverse sets of customer data, in support of minutely segmented and targeted communications, that customers interact with across a myriad of devices,” Hopkins said. “B2C email, well executed, is built on some of the best practices of digital marketing today. This knowledge, plus support for text, social and web, will benefit Oracle, especially as they seek to grow their B2C customer base.”
Responsys helps Oracle offer digital marketing execution (messaging) and services (strategy, creative, etc.) to complement its infrastructure and analytics products, Brosnan said.
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