Eloqua – the most elegant piece in Oracle CX Strategy

Ever since Oracle acquired Eloqua (Dec 2012), I started exploring Eloqua‘s fitment into Oracle’s Cloud Strategy, more specifically Oracle’s Cloud CX Strategy

I discussed in couple of my previous posts in terms of how Fusion CRM fills in Oracle CX Sales & Marketing Strategy and RN fills in CX Service Strategy. Saying that if you look into closely on what Fusion Sales has on marketing front today, it may not be as well rounded like what is being offered by Fusion CRM on Sales side.

A connected point to this is Oracle’s acquisition of Market2Lead couple of years ago where Oracle went ahead and acquired the Market2Lead IP and built / started selling On Demand Marketing (ODM) that works hand-in-hand with CRM On Demand to compliment the marketing needs that CRM On Demand really lacks.

Before On Demand Marketing (ODM), people familiar with CRM On Demand knows that Email Marketing On Demand (EMOD) is the only piece that was complimenting CRM On Demand to support simple email marketing campaign. With ODM CRM On Demand got better as ODM not only offered advanced email campaigns but also supports web campaign which was lacking in EMOD

The above Market2Lead / ODM acquisition, adds confusion and question to Oracle’s acquisition of Eloqua as far all practical reasons, it is a common understanding that there are some overlaps between Eloqua and Market2Lead / ODM. It is also something I know from Open World Sessions, that Oracle plans to leverage the same Market2Lead / ODM IP to build the marketing piece of Fusion CRM which is still not complete

My analysis on the above question on why Oracle acquired one more Marketing solution which kind of overlaps with ODM / Market2Lead leads to the below inputs

• Oracle only acquired IP of Market2Leead, whereas it acquired the entire company Eloqua for $871 M USD. This makes it obvious that Oracle’s interest is not just on Eloqua‘s technology (which is interesting J2EE unlike RN), but also has serious interest in Eloqua‘s customer base. If you further slice into Eloqua ‘s customer base, it is a fact that bulk of Eloqua ‘s existing customers are Salesforce customers as Eloqua offered an app exchange solution for Salesforce to compliment Salesforce in Marketing. With acquisition of Eloqua, Oracle has gained entry into Salesforce customer base as well has control to decide on future road map of appexchange product that makes Eloqua work with Salesforce.com
• Second important point is that unlike Market2Lead which is one among many SaaS-based marketing solutions; Eloqua is a market leader in this space as ranked by Gartner. The features of Eloqua on campaign segmentation, usability of building reusable campaigns as well ability to execute campaigns across multiple channels make it as a leader in the On-Demand marketing automation segment
• Finally Marketing Automation space is a real happening space and companies like Eloqua were growing at a rate of 30% y-o-y which is a clear indication on how hot this area is. Moreover, some of the notable deals in this space like Teradata acquisition of Aprimo, IBM acquisition of Unica, ExactTarget’s acquisition of Pardot, SLD acquisition of Alterian, etc., are strong pointers/clues to understanding the business potential in this space. The deals which were happening at 5X of Revenue in this space are reaching 10 X today with Oracle’s Eloqua ‘s acquisition

With the above analysis, it is very clear that Oracle’s acquisition of Eloqua is very strategic from multiple perspectives and I am sure that with Oracle’s marketing and brand support the product which is already an Industry leader would pretty soon sees greater heights. I am also sure it is question of few quarters for Salesforce to go and acquire the runner up product in this segment Marketo …Wait and Watch this space ….

                                                                                                                   Venkatesan Sundaram
Senior Director, CRMIT

Originally Published on Venky’s Blog