Oracle plans deep integration of Eloqua marketing tech

Oracle will make sure its recently acquired Eloqua marketing cloud plays along with Microsoft and Salesforce systems, though it plans to closely link the marketing suite with its own sales technology as well.

Describing Eloqua as "the centerpiece for Oracle's cloud," Oracle's president Mark Hurd said in a webcast on Thursday that the marketing tech will let Oracle customers target the modern customer — someone who is "always connected, always aware, and is always sharing".

Eloqua allows businesses to combine various marketing strands — mailouts, social media, email, and so on — into single manageable campaigns that can be saved, tweaked, and run again.

Marketers can also use it to analyse the targets of their campaigns and identify the "influencers" that will let them make scads and scads of money, if properly targeted.

"Modern marketing helps automate and personalize the [customer] interactions," Hurd said, showing that perhaps he could do with some Eloqua-style coaching about the language he uses.

Oracle bought Eloqua for $871m in December as Ellison sought to build out his young Oracle cloud.

"We believe global companies need a product with the sophistication of Eloqua," said Oracle's vice president of product development Thomas Kurian.

For that reason, Oracle is going to invest in five key areas to develop the Eloqua tech: it will buff up the user experience, invest in integrating the tech with its own Oracle Sales cloud, bulk up its analytical capabilities, make various functional enhancements, and localize and internationalize the product so global mega-corps can use it across their operations.

"Additionally, we'll continue supporting Open APIs," Kurian said. "You can use this along with your own investments that you already have."

By example, many customers like to use Eloqua combined with Salesforce. This will continue to be possible, Kurian said, touting the "bidirectional data integration" features that will let the two programs exchange information with each other.

Eloqua was founded in 1999, went public in 2012, and at the time of the buy had 100,000 users across 1,200 customers. Two of its major customers were Oracle-rivals Dell and HP.

Oracle spent much of the webcast talking up its commitment to Eloqua's customers and their freedom to use non-Oracle products. So far it has stayed true to this, but the database giant does have a tendency to exert control over companies new to the fold. ®