Digest...

"As you can see, in many areas we're leaders, such as marketing."

Larry Ellison at Oracle’s Open World

VentureBeat: What’s your takeaway so far from OpenWorld?

I found it noteworthy that [newly appointed Oracle co-CEO] Mike Hurd’s keynote on Monday morning featured nine CIOs but no CMOs. Last year, there were only eight tracks for marketers, and this year they had 50 or something, but it’s very obvious how entrenched Oracle still is in IT-speak. Obviously, it has Eloqua, but that’s very B2B, and it’s been still a very technical play. It’s not a marketer play in the same way a Responsys is.

For all of the talk and momentum and the things they are doing to focus on the CMO and focus on the marketer, they still clearly have a deep-seated affiliation and comfort with the IT side of things.

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Digest...

The marketing cloud meets the storage cloud as Oracle's Eloqua now offers a new integration with file storage and collaboration platform Box.

The new integration will enable marketing teams to store, edit and collaborate on their marketing content before sending it out through Eloqua's B2B marketing automation platform.

Marketing teams can use Box to store documents they have created in content producing applications such as Microsoft Word. Multiple team members can access and view the document in a single place, with the ability to annotate changes, write comments and keep track of versions. Once the document is finalized, it can be directly converted to HTML through Box and then placed directly into Eloqua, ready to be deployed in a marketing message such as an email.

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Digest...

Unlike other platforms that have built solutions for the cloud from the ground up, much of Oracle's clout in the space has come from its many acquisitions. Its marketing cloud especially, consists of blockbuster acquisitions of marketing automation software such as Eloqua, Responsys and most recently data platform BlueKai. Ellison was bullish about Oracle's cloud prospects, saying the company's marketing cloud was clearly a market leader.

Oracle president Mark Hurd chimed in by listing a few of the big name clients that were now using Oracle Marketing Cloud. "We won Kaiser, ITEN, LexMark, Panasonic, Thomson Reuters, Time Warner Cable, Ricoh, I mean these are all quality names that have adopted Oracle marketing," said Hurd.

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Intermediate/ Digest...

Oracle has been one of the most aggressive companies in building a comprehensive suite of cloud marketing offerings, snapping up marketing-automation companies Eloqua and Responsys, and data-management platform BlueKai over the past two years. The field is intensely competitive, with Salesforce, IBM, Adobe, SAP, among others, also building out their offerings.

Mr. Hurd also hinted that it will continue to beef up its offering. "We're going to drive this marketing cloud," he said. "Which means for us, continuing to add depth and breadth from a capability perspective."

From DemandGen:

Oracle Marketing Cloud is designed to provide marketers with the enterprise capabilities they need, including unifying customer data and engaging the right audiences across channels. The combined solution is expected to help marketers predict their customers' behavior, transform content into strategic marketing assets and build advocacy to drive company profitability and revenue.

From the Oracle/Eloqua blog:

It’s time for marketers to take a different approach. Today we’re officially launching Oracle Marketing Cloud, which provides a way to simplify the marketer’s experience and empower CMOs and their teams to deliver on the promise of customer centricity. Oracle Marketing Cloud combines the capabilities of Eloqua, BlueKai, Compendium, and Responsys with the social relationship management components of Oracle Social Cloud.

With all of these capabilities brought together, Oracle Marketing Cloud provides the industry’s most comprehensive suite of tools for unifying customer data, analyzing behaviors and sentiment, and executing precise marketing programs that resonate with each and every customer.

The Holy Grail for customer personalization is rooted in a deep, meaningful understanding of our audiences and communities. As a result of the proliferation of data sources, we’re able to capture data across owned, earned, and paid channels. This valuable data can inform our strategies as marketers in ways that allow us to deliver much-improved customer experiences.

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Intermediate/ Excerpt...

Oracle today extended the Oracle Marketing Cloud. The new features and enhancements to Oracle Eloqua, a component of Oracle Marketing Cloud, help modern marketers optimize the customer experience and execute marketing campaigns that have a measurable impact on revenue.

-- >  Extending its commitment to helping CMOs and their global marketing teams optimize the customer experience and execute marketing campaigns that have a measurable impact on revenue, Oracle today introduced new functionality and enhancements to Oracle Eloqua.

-- >  With the latest release of Oracle Eloqua, marketers can deliver more meaningful engagement and experiences than ever before by integrating data sources to build a complete and actionable view of customers.

-- >  The enhancements support key marketing initiatives, including content marketing and social relationship management, by empowering marketers to deliver targeted and dynamic content in emails, blogs, social media sites and landing pages.

-- >  To help further optimize the performance of marketing campaigns, the latest release of Oracle Eloqua also includes Revenue Dashboards that provide clear and actionable visibility into marketing’s impact on revenue and customer responses.

-- >  Oracle Eloqua is the only solution that enables marketers to manage campaigns with owned, earned and paid media objectives in a single platform.

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Excerpt...

Customers can now monitor, publish, and analyze social campaigns from within their Eloqua environment to help them save time, increase revenue, and achieve modern marketing performance goals. Key highlights include:

1. Campaign ID Integration
This gives marketers true cross-channel campaign management and analytics by enabling Eloqua campaign content to be tagged, tracked, and analyzed across social channels.

2. Enhanced Social Content Promotion
“Smart CAP” (Smart Create a Post) capabilities enable marketers to quickly promote online and offline content with one-click publishing automation. Content can be distributed to social channels including Facebook, Google+, and YouTube, allowing marketers to efficiently message on target social channels.

3. Custom Audience Creation
Marketers can target the right audience on social media with relevant and timely content by creating scalable, real-time, and hyper-targeted campaigns. All groups are dynamically maintained in near real-time allowing for ongoing campaign development.

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In our new eBook, Marketing Automation Simplified, we aim to give you a small guide to help your team get your big ideas off the ground.

We break marketing automation down “by Tenet” for a look at the functionalities and strategic measures driving each core element of modern marketing success. So you’ll get a better understanding of how what you need to do to refine your targeting, engagement, analysis, and conversion strategies, in addition to how technology plays a role in your initiatives.

Effective email marketing, demand generation, and lead management processes hinge on a modern strategy closely aligned to buyer needs and expectations across all phases of the buying process.

Here’s a sneak peek at what you’ll learn:

• How to help your teams manage lead flow more effectively
• How to establish your audience of content consumers
• And deliver the right information on their preferred channels
• How to address the ‘independent buying cycle’
• And use your insights to improve your processes

Key excerpts...

[David Raab has] little doubt that Marketo can manage a successful IPO.  But it's less clear it can survive long-term as an independent company.  Previous marketing automation leaders including Eloqua, Unica, and Aprimo all ended up as part of larger organizations.  The fundamental reason is that marketing is ever-more-closely related to other business activities, as companies strive to provide an integrated customer experience.  Clients prefer to buy complete, integrated suites for all customer-management functions.  They good news for marketing automation vendors is that they can plug a gap that many big vendors need to fill.

But the real world is more complicated than the picture suggests. B2B and B2C marketers have different requirements. Eloqua is more flexible than most B2B marketing automation systems but still can't match a good B2C system. The biggest issue is data structure: Eloqua is built around a standard model based on CRM systems.  It does let users add auxiliary tables but even those are subject to some constraints. A true B2C system can accommodate any data model. There are also issues of scalability and of specialized needs such as programs with hundreds or thousands of segments. It’s hard to imagine Eloqua competing in the top tier of B2C. It might be able to support mid-size B2C systems, but that doesn’t seem to be Oracle’s intent.

Oracle integration of Eloqua...

Oracle Social Engagement and Monitoring will classify and aggregate social data and feed it into Eloqua's segmentation model, Kurian added. Sales and marketing teams will be able to collaborate using Oracle Social Network. Finally, Oracle's core CRM (customer relationship management) software will provide lead management, sales automation and contact management as well as feed customer profile data into Eloqua for campaign targeting and other purposes.

Impact on SFDC...

To that end, it has long been speculated that Salesforce.com will acquire a marketing automation vendor rather than continue to rely on partners such as Eloqua and Marketo, but that hasn't happened so far. Salesforce.com also made an investment in Infor, which has a marketing automation product called Epiphany.

"They have too many small investments that create a conflict of interest if they get into marketing," said analyst Ray Wang, CEO of Constellation Research. "So they have to create a place for marketing products to fit in the ecosystem without cannibalizing it. Hence the confusion."

"In Oracle's case, they bought one of the best cloud-based marketing platforms, and they will keep buying their way into innovation in the cloud," Wang added.

Core CRM software "has been a failure at most companies," Wang said. "It succeeded at managing sales folks and automation, it barely touched the customer, it sucked at building relationships. The shift away from CRM is about front office and supporting customer experiences. The emphasis is about engagement and building relationships. We're now focusing on the more important aspects at which CRM failed."

We suppose this may be a fairly obvious post, as Eloqua/Oracle are far more prominent in the larger enterprise than the mid-market, but the author points out the rationale very clearly...

For most mid-sized organizations, flooding their marketing automation with more data will create an unwieldy beast. These companies will also be reluctant to invest in more marketing technology when so far, marketing automation has failed to deliver on its promise of a consistent volume of high quality leads and a pipeline of rich opportunities.

Why is that? Mid-sized organizations are discovering that marketing automation is just a piece of the puzzle. To achieve ROI on the technology, organizations must invest 10X its cost to effectively run it. Marketing automation requires resources to support database development, content creation, integrated campaign execution to support demand generation, sales enablement tools to support the opportunity stage and reporting to support effective decision-making.

Larger organizations have the staff, budget and content assets in place to use marketing automation to its full potential. Small and mid-sized companies simply can’t do everything that is required to make use of marketing automation in its current state. They don’t need more add-ons for business intelligence and Big Data. These organizations need talent and resources to run an effective digital marketing program and to make proper use of the technology they already own.

Have I told you that Scott Brinker is brilliant?  Here are the high points...please absorb and enjoy!:

Customer experience may be the rallying flag for this, but there's something noteworthy purely about Oracle championing the vanishing boundaries between traditional and digital channels and methods. The Oracle-Eloqua deal is not the first move in that direction — IBM has clearly been pursuing this as well — but it is a major step forward in that transition. This is what David Cooperstein of Forrester recently called post-digital marketing. "Like the shift from modern to post-modernist art and architecture," David wrote, "where we encountered architects like Michael Graves and Richard Meier who blended modern purity with classical touches, we are entering a world where digital innovation is merging with traditional marketing fundamentals to create new approaches, new brand leaders, and new models for success."

We're experiencing simultaneous waves of consolidation and diversification in marketing technology. And I predict more investment in this space in 2013 than any year before. Why? Because this new era of marketing — the post-digital marketing era of customer experience — is just at the beginning of a 10 to 20-year revolution. The world in which this new approach is emerging is still tremendously in flux, with new innovations appearing at an accelerating rate. There's no lack of opportunity for new ventures in this remaking of the world.

That being said, I do think this deal moves us closer to a market structure that has a consolidated marketing backbone supporting a diversified marketing body. This is the third possibility I discussed in my post on 3 different futures for marketing technology: a few consolidated platforms with highly diversified ecosystems of specialized apps.