Certainly Oracle has been busy shopping through 2012 to boost its cloud capability with purchases such as Taleo, cloud HR company and RightNow, cloud customer service company.
- To me, the move is an additional indicator of the increasing importance of marketing, teamed with technology, in any business.
- Modern marketing companies such as Eloqua, Marketo and Hubspot are at the forefront providing marketing automation software that gives actionable intelligence on prospective customers.
Doubi Ajami writes Have you heard that Oracle has bought Eloqua, a Marketing Automation Software company for $871 million, more than 10 times the yearly total sales of Eloqua ? Are you wondering why?
I was! Certainly Oracle has been busy shopping through 2012 to boost its cloud capability with purchases such as Taleo, cloud HR company and RightNow, cloud customer service company. SAP appears to be following the same strategy. But why Eloqua? Why a Marketing Automation Software company?
Why a Marketing Company?
To me, the move is an additional indicator of the increasing importance of marketing, teamed with technology, in any business. According to analysts Gartner “by 2017 the CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) will Spend More on IT Than the CIO”. The business landscape is shifting due to changes in the customer behavior, the world is going online, social & web are increasingly driving buying decisions. Marketing is responding, combining art and science and growing in sophistication, innovation and in enabling technology. Modern marketing companies such as Eloqua, Marketo and Hubspot are at the forefront providing marketing automation software that gives actionable intelligence on prospective customers.
Eloqua is an enterprise level product, strong in lead nurturing/scoring and in segmenting/profiling contacts. In June 2012 Gartner placed Eloqua in the “Leaders” quadrant in their Magic Quadrant for CRM Lead Management.