The race to become the integrated sales and marketing technology platform of choice has intensified with Oracle’s announcement of its roadmap to integrate the newly acquired Eloqua platform into the Oracle Sales Cloud.
In a live webcast, broadcast at 17:00 UK time on Thursday Feb 21st, Eloqua CEO Joe Payne, Mark Hurd, president of Oracle and Thomas Kurian EVP of Oracle explained how Eloqua’s market leading marketing automation platform would fit in a combined social, CRM and automation infrastructure that Oracle was creating following the acquisition deal.
Crucially, they were at pains to point out that Eloqua would continue to support and integrate with rival CRM platforms, specifically Salesforce and Microsoft. This was aimed at reassuring Eloqua’s existing customers that currently do not use Oracle’s CRM offering that their marketing automation platforms would continue to integrate with their CRM system.
However, the focus of the presentation was on the vision for integration of the Eloqua platform with the Oracle Cloud environment, the opportunities this would create for marketing and sales professionals and the ongoing functional enhancements to the Eloqua system, including enhanced globalisation and localisation capabilities.
Kurian from Oracle was also keen to express the acquirer’s eagerness to ensure that the Eloqua management team remains onboard to lead the ongoing development of the platform, and its integration into the Oracle platform.
The webcast follows Oracle’s unexpected $871 million acquisition of Eloqua, which was announced in December. The focus will now be on which of the global technology giants acts first to snap up rival marketing automation vendor Marketo, which has made great strides in recent months to close the gap on Eloqua, which has been the long term segment market leader. Salesforce, Adobe and Microsoft are touted as the likely favourites to make this acquisition.
