Skip to main content

Oracle Is Getting Ahead Of The Competition When It Comes To Data



Hot on the heels of a partnership with Dun & Bradstreet, the announcement of the Datalogix acquisition marks an aggressive move on Oracle’s part — an attempt to prove to the market that it’s getting serious about data-driven marketing. Salesforce added Datalogix to its marketing cloud back in April 2014. This Oracle acquisition will probably be making some Salesforce folks feel like they got a lump of coal in their stocking this year.

The past year has seen much fanfare surrounding marketing cloud solutions, integrated software promising to help maximize and measure marketing impact across all activities. Oracle’s Data Cloud is the latest part of the company’s answer to this growing category, and Adobe, Marketo, Salesforce, SAP, and IBM all have their own take on the one-stop enterprise solutions. In developing its own cloud platform, Oracle has been highly acquisitive in recent years — scooping up Eloqua, Responsys, BlueKai and Compendium — among others.

Not many people predicted that Oracle would buy Datalogix; in fact many thought that Facebook might scoop them up. Despite all the data Facebook has on consumers, they are a customer of Datalogix. It clearly signals a shift in direction for Oracle and draws some comparisons to LinkedIn’s acquisition of Bizo. Companies are looking for ways to combine targeting and attribution with data being the common component and the marketing cloud suites are seeking ways to address this.

Attribution is hard. Prospects and customers engage with brands across so many touchpoints along the path-to-purchase, and marketers struggle with effectively assigning influence to their various investments. Marketing cloud solutions like Oracle’s Data Cloud promise to help alleviate this pain, but it remains to be seen how well data will flow between traditionally siloed systems, and the value that marketers will gain.

Still, in the wake of all the marketing clouds touted the past year, specialized solutions continue to emerge. Whether this is indicative of the fact that the big players aren’t yet living up to their one-size-fits-all promise is unclear.

In order to deliver a marketing cloud that’s more than just lip service, companies need to truly connect the dots between all customer identities — cookies, emails, URLs, IP addresses, social handles, mobile, and so on — bridge between marketing application silos, and add real insights on top of it all. Data is a key component to this, and Oracle would seem to have made a savvy move. Expect Salesforce to reply soon.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document?  That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the docum...
1 comment
Read more

Boom, the startup that wants to build supersonic planes, just signed a massive deal with Virgin

Have you heard about Boom? Boom is a relatively new startup that’s aiming to build something pretty crazy. They’re not building an app… or a social network… or even some new gadget for the Kickstarter crowd. Boom wants to build planes. Really, really, really fast planes. Specifically, they’re trying to design and build a supersonic passenger plane that goes 2.2x the speed of sound. If all goes to plan, they’ll be able to shuttle people from New York to London in 3.5 hours, and SF to Tokyo in 4.5. Sound crazy? I wouldn’t disagree. It’s worth noting that the company is in the very early days for something as intensive, massive, and hugely expensive as designing and producing a passenger aircraft. They’re still working on their first prototype, and hope to fly it by late next year. But it’s also worth noting that the team behind the plane has some serious talent in its blood: the company’s 11 employees have collectively contributed to over 30 aircrafts — having worked on thin...
Post a Comment
Read more

Fun Tools to Translate Your Name into Japanese Calligraphy

Japanese calligraphy is an artistic writing style of the Japanese language. Its Chinese origins can be traced back to the twenty-eighth century BCE. Calligraphy found its way into Japanese culture in 600 CE and is known as the karayo tradition. For Westerners, calligraphy is forever fascinating. However, it takes years to learn how to properly draw the signs. Two basic principles must be known to understand Japanese writing: there are different writing styles and different alphabets. Kaisho for example, is a writing style most commonly used in print media. Tensho on the other hand is used in signatures. Other writing styles are Reisho, Gyosho and Sousho. The alphabets include Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana. Katakana is used for writing foreign words. It can also serve to highlight words, in analogy to capital letters as we know them from the Roman / Latin alphabet (Romaji in Japanese). Each Kanji character has a meaning of its own, while Hiragana or Katakana characters merely repres...
Post a Comment
Read more