Oracle Corp. is buying data management platform BlueKai Inc. for an undisclosed sum, though Dan Primack of Fortune reports the amount could be around $400 million.
Announcing its plans for acquiring BlueKai today, Oracle said it will be integrating BlueKai with its other acquisitions – Responsys and Eloqua, two companies it acquired in the same week in December 2013, writes Alan Kantrowitz for Ad Age. By adding on the acquisition of BlueKai, Oracle’s hope is that it can help its B2B customers with delivering personalized, targeted messages to consumers.
For Oracle, the acquisition is part of its strategy to compete with Adobe Inc., Salesforce Inc., IBM Corp., and SAP AG in their bids to gain customers for the marketing cloud. All of them are trying to build out their services to give customers the most complete offering, said Forrester analyst Cory Munchbach in an email to Kantrowitz.
“BlueKai is a highly-regarded data management platform with a broad footprint and is known for being able to partner with a diversity of other technologies,” Munchbach said. “The company says BlueKai’s data will be directly integrated into the Responsys and Eloqua products – a tantalizing prospect for customers.”
Plus, adding BlueKai’s data capabilities to Eloqua should help marketers skip just the basic targeting criteria – name, industry, website visits, and webinar attendance – and do more, allowing them to reach other segments, said Brian Kardon, former CMO for Eloqua, in an interview with Kantrowitz.
Kardon, who is now CMO for Lattice Engines, a predictive marketing and sales analytics company, became CMO for Eloqua in 2008, working there up until 2012. He called the BlueKai acquisition the chance for Oracle to do “much more intelligent marketing,” allowing the company to expand its “pinata strategy.”
The company typically kept hitting CIOs with products to make money fall out, and now that CMOs are taking more and more of their organizations’ budgets, it’s doing the same with them, Kardon said.
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