Oracle’s Position in the Marketing Cloud Space versus Peers
Over past couple of years, Oracle, SAP (SAP), and Salesforce (CRM) have aggressively turned to acquisitions in order to strengthen their footholds in the marketing cloud space.
Dec. 4 2020, Updated 10:53 a.m. ET
The marketing cloud and automation space has seen a slew of acquisitions in the recent past
In the prior part of this series, we discussed Oracle’s (ORCL) acquisition of Maxymiser in detail. In April 2015, NetSuite (N) bought Bronto Software for approximately $200 million. Bronto Software provides cloud-based marketing automation software for omni-channel commerce. In April 2014, IBM (IBM) acquired Silverpop, which offers marketing automation and real-time customization technology. Marketing automation players like Marketo (MKTO) and Hubspot (HUBS) floated their initial public offerings and became public in 2013 and 2014, respectively.
Salesforce and Adobe are trying vigorously to overtake each other in the marketing cloud space
Over past couple of years, Oracle, SAP (SAP), and Salesforce (CRM) have aggressively turned to acquisitions in order to strengthen their footholds in the marketing cloud space. The above chart shows the different marketing solutions that each company offers in its digital marketing clouds as of early 2014. Adobe started the earliest and is rapidly moving ahead in the integration process.
During 2009–2013, Adobe (ADBE) made five acquisitions to boost its Marketing Cloud presence:
- Omniture
- Day Software
- Auditude
- Efficient Frontier
- Neolane
Neolane is the latest acquisition by Adobe, from 2013. It enhanced Adobe’s presence in the marketing cloud, as it integrates online and offline marketing data across an enterprise. Over the past four quarters, Adobe reported an average 15% growth rate in its marketing cloud revenues.
Salesforce (CRM) acquired ExactTarget, a cloud marketing platform, for $2.5 billion in 2013. It also acquired Radian6—a social listening tool—for $326 million in 2011 and Buddy Media—a social media marketing software and publishing tool—for $689 million in 2012. In total, Salesforce has approximately spent $3.5 billion on acquisitions to build its Marketing Cloud. Recently, at its Dreamforce event, the company unveiled an extension of its marketing cloud into the company’s overall suite of sales, marketing, support, and service capabilities.
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