Although its technically been around for a while, Oracle formally introduced its integrated Marketing Cloud platform to a room full of marketers at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York.
Oracle president Mark Hurd delivered a presentation on the newly integrated product, which is made up of several very expensive companies that Oracle acquired over the last year. This includes marketing automation platforms Eloqua and Responsys, along with data and analytics hub BlueKai, which are all supposed to integrate with Oracle’s own Social Cloud and Content Marketing suites. This is the first time Oracle is presenting all those solutions as a unified set, to take on the offerings of Adobe, Salesforce, IBM and HP.
“This has now become a big business for us,” said Hurd. “From a cloud revenue perspective, this is hundreds of millions of dollars for us. This is a material, core vertical and it’s a material part in terms of where we think profit will grow.”
Oracle may have snapped up some of the best toys in the industry, but as our analysis of the marketing cloud space shows, its not so much about the individual quality of the platforms as it is about the level of integration between them. Put simply, the greatest value marketers will get from using an integrated digital marketing suite is from how well the individual platforms share data and coordinate execution.
Hurd said as much while answering questions from the audience. “The fact that everything ever works perfectly together, anybody who tells you that is pulling your leg,” said Hurd. “There will never be a day where the depth of integration, unless it was all built from the bottom ground up, will be integrated as any of us would like.”
The big five enterprise tech firms have been competing heavily to become the first to offer a completely unified solution, and this has resulted in plenty of acquisition activity happening in the space. Most recently IBM snapped up marketing automation Silverpop and Adobe revealed several new integrations for its platform at its Marketing Summit in March.
