Following its string of social media acquisitions, Oracle has pulled all its social capabilities into one product, allowing marketers to create and publish content, listen to and engage customers, and analyze interactions from a single interface.
Unveiled at the South by Southwest conference, Oracle’s Social Relationship Management (SRM) product ties together capabilities gained when the company acquired Vitrue, a social marketing and engagement platform, social intelligence firm Collective Intellect, and Involver, a company that lets developers create customized marketing applications for social media sites.
“Oracle Social Relationship Management brings together traditionally disparate social solutions into one, powerful enterprise platform, allowing customers to fully leverage and maximize social data, insights and interactions to improve customer interactions and business results,” said Thomas Kurian, executive VP of product development at Oracle, in a statement.
The SRM offering, which is part of the Social Relationship Management Suite, will also integrate with Oracle’s other customer experience products, including its RightNow customer service platform, Eloqua marketing automation system, and Fusion and Siebel CRM software.
Today’s announcement highlights the race between vendors like Oracle and Salesforce.com, (which bought Vitrue rival Buddy Media) to offer solutions that allow companies to deepen their relationship with customers, observes Jake Wengroff, head of the social media practice at research firm Gleanster.
“Oracle is clearly chasing a new department and professional category — marketing, media, communications — one that is perhaps unfamiliar with Oracle’s existing key strengths,” Wengroff said.
Meanwhile, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff recently said his company’s new goal is to help clients become “customer companies.”
“A customer revolution is the next logical place in this industry. We are going to connect with customers in entirely new ways,” Benioff said at a keynote address in New York last week.
An interesting side note of the Oracle/Salesforce.com rivalry involves the marketing automation firm Eloqua, which was acquired by Oracle last December. While Oracle has indicated that it will integrate Eloqua’s marketing capabilities into its SRM product, it has also said that customers will be able to continue using other vendors’ products on Eloqua’s platform.
“We have a very strong relationship with Salesforce,” Jody Mooney, Eloqua senior product manager, told AdExchanger. “Eloqua has an agnostic support for other systems and like [Oracle applications executive Steve Miranda and Eloqua CEO Joe Payne] explained during a webcast nearly two weeks ago, that isn’t changing.”
