Eloqua's
Fit in the Oracle Application Portolio
Eloqua
is being brought in as the 'centerpiece of the marketing cloud' solution within
the broader Customer Experience Cloud offering.
The Customer Experience Cloud is Oracle's comprehensive go-to-market
strategy for its CRM offerings that it introduced in mid-2012. Additionally, Eloqua will be leveraged with
integrations to Fusion CRM and ultimately extended into vertical offerings. There is overlap with the previously acquired
Market2Lead product in terms of campaign capabilities but Oracle spokesmen
stated that Eloqua would be the primary product and Market2Lead would be
integrated to it.
Market
Reaction
First and foremost, Oracle
is serious about its CRM business.
According to IDC market numbers, Oracle has led the worldwide CRM
applications market since its purchase of Siebel, holding 11% of the market in
the 2011 shares data. However, both SAP
and Salesforce.com are within two percentage points of that share fueling
Oracle's motivation to maintain and increase the distance. The current battle ground of competition
within the CRM applications market is being fought in the marketing automation
segment where, as this IDC Data Map shows, the traditional transactional
vendors hold much smaller footprints.
This
acquisition immediately brings to mind the question, 'what will Salesforce.com
do now?' Not only was and is Eloqua a
key partner of Salesforce's, the company relied on it and similar partners to
provide this capability to its customer base.
Salesforce.com's acquisitions in the marketing arena to date have been
focused on social marketing capabilities.
While Oracle was explicit in stating that the product, like the other
components of its various applications offerings, is capable of being used in a
heterogeneous environment, Salesforce.com won't be happy long sharing its
customer base Eloqua today, has a
significant number of Salesforce.com customers in its base as well as Microsoft
Dynamics CRM. Marketo may become far
more attractive to Salesforce.com as the new year begins.
Conclusion
Overall, the latest
acquisition by Oracle signals a commitment to building a fully comprehensive
product offering for its CRM business that covers all the major elements of the
CRM applications market. For Oracle the coming
year will be one of bringing integrations and proof points to market. For the other marketing automation vendors
with broad marketing capabilities, specifically Adobe, IBM and SAS, there will
be more of a trade-off for customer evaluating products between a CRM suite
solution and best-of-breed.