One of the biggest names in IT, Oracle, has announced it plans to purchase Eloqua, a cloud based Marketing Automation provider that had been positioning itself as a revenue performance management company.
Yes, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said he wouldn't be making any big moves back at OpenWorld this fall (heard that before), but companies as big as Oracle simply don't sit still for long.
Still a Few Days Left in 2012 for More M&A
While the reported US$ 871 million deal for Eloqua is by far the biggest Oracle deal in months, it's only one of two buys the company made in December alone (so far). Oracle has also bought up a company called DataRaker, a cloud-based analytics company focused primarily on electric, gas and water utilities.
As for Eloqua, Oracle is getting a full featured digital marketing suite that will help customers build personalized, consistent campaigns all along the customer journey.
That should include social media, and most importantly, unifying marketing and sales teams.
Oracle is such a huge company, it never lacks for new releases and various updates for its range of software, but Eloqua has been around for over a decade as well, and their 2012 was pretty full, too. In fact, the company only went public back in August.
Perhaps that was the signal a company like Oracle was waiting for.
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Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is poised to make his company a force in digital marketing. drserg / Shutterstock.com
Enterprise IT Battle in the Cloud
Oracle and its competitors like Salesforce, IBM and SAP have all been busy moving all kinds of products into the cloud. With the Eloqua buy, Oracle has positioned itself once again at the forefront of this movement.
We have to wonder, however, what will become of recent moves by Eloqua like its integration of Salesforce Chatter. It wouldn't be too hard simply to turn that feature off, we suppose.
That won't be until the middle of 2013, though. Oracle announced it should close the deal in the first half of the new year, so until then, Eloqua will still be its own company.
