Last Thursday Adobe hosted its intimate Symposium in San Francisco, which reiterated the theme of Summit held in Utah in March – a theme of “reinvention.” Today, Oracle’s new CTO Larry Ellison kicked off OpenWorld. He focused significantly on the cloud. How are the two themes related? It comes down to the importance data and its use throughout the organization.
Cloud is increasingly necessary for companies that manage growing numbers of interconnected data sources and big data analytics. Oracle may be late to the cloud, but they are certainly not to be discounted. Their numerous marketing tech acquisitions over the past few years make them particularly important to watch (people would have looked at you funny if you said “Oracle” and “Marketing” together in the same sentence a few years ago, but certainly not today). By combining its database offering with its Marketing Cloud, Oracle will hope to entice customers with one-stop-shopping.
Marketing of the future is about personalization at scale, which requires vast amounts of data to be aggregated, analyzed, and acted upon in increasingly near real-time. The number of solutions and amount of integration required for that process is becoming more complex every day, so the more a vendor like Oracle can provide a compelling, integrated offering, the more appealing it will be to buyers. Salesforce and Adobe have also invested in marketing technology recently, building their own “Marketing Clouds.”
It will become increasingly difficult for brands to connect all the required data and customer engagement elements themselves, so suites or platforms of cloud technology stand to gain ground if they can make their case. Oracle will aim to do just that at OpenWorld this week.