In the last couple of weeks Oracle announced that they will buy Vitrue, “a leading cloud-based social marketing and engagement platform that enables marketers to centrally create, publish, moderate, manage, measure and report on their social marketing campaigns”, at least that’s what the brochure says. On the web, opinions range from very positive, what else would you do when you get bought and see a sunny future ahead of you, to very negative, questioning whether Larry Ellisons state-of-mind went to insane or not.
Three days ago Oracle announced to buy Collective Intellect, a real time text analytics company which has several cloud based products in this particular area, ranging from social media analytics to inhouse data analytics. Once again this acquisition (like the Vitrue acquisition) is one in the strategic Customer Experience line, since this will boost customer experience through usage of the social conversations (both external as well as internal) as sources of customer intelligence and take direct action on it in the interaction with customers. Hence making better targeting of the audience possible.
Taking a look at the comments now, people tend to see a more strategic line and also start seeing the way Oracle is repositioning towards Salesforce.com .
Let’s face it this acquisition together with the Vitrue one is making Salesforce’s live harder, over and over again.
The art of the possible
So would you call these acquisitions strategic? Well the truth is out there on the web. Taking a look at the reference the acquired companies have themselves and what value they can bring within the rest of the Oracle product stack they will be combined with, to my opinion the answer is most definitely: Yes!
This is most definitely all part of Oracle’s Cloud strategy (by the way did you watch this) and it’s strategy around Customer Experience. We see the great value of this strategy. What Oracle do is, they combine the products that are capable of making customer experience possible right from the start. Making sure the products they acquire adhere to there standard of open integration and fitting it in with the other products.
We as Capgemini go even a bit further. We take our in depth knowledge of customers, for instance in the Retail and Consumer products sectors and us it to combine all of the necessary Oracle components into one, fully (pre) integrated solution.
With this solution Capgemini and Oracle together make a full All Channel Experience possible for our Retail and Consumer Products customers.
So do you want to engage and interact with your customer through all channels with the best possible customer experience today, do not hesitate and contact Capgemini, we’ll make I happen for you and show you the art of the possible!
Arjan Kramer is Oracle Solution Architect for Capgemini and thoughtleader on B2C Direct
Originally posted on the Capgemini Oracle Blog
