With marketers become ever-more reliant on technology and importantly, data integration, to deliver the customer experiences organisations need today, CIOs can no longer afford to ignore the many platforms and solutions at their disposal.
Oracle has pushed out a major update to its E-Business Suite of applications, in a move that underscores the company's challenge of meeting customer needs while also persuading them to adopt its next-generation Fusion cloud software.
After spending billions to acquire a series of marketing-related software companies, Oracle is now undergoing the process of creating a unified suite it can take to battle against competing offerings from the likes of Salesforce.com and Microsoft.
Oracle is rolling out a series of new features for its Eloqua marketing automation suite, hoping to get a leg up on rivals such as Salesforce.com and IBM in the red-hot software segment.
Global CRM (customer relationship management) revenue grew 12.5 percent last year to US$18 billion, a rate three times that of all enterprise software segments on average, as companies look to acquire more business and serve existing customers better, according to a new Gartner report.
Oracle has laid in out in detail how it intends to compete with the likes of Salesforce.com in the highly competitive arena for next-generation marketing software.
Oracle has agreed to acquire Eloqua for about US$871 million, in a bid to build out a set of marketing automation software.
Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff is known as a big thinker and talker, and now he's hoping to be one of Silicon Valley's biggest party hosts, with more than 42,000 people registered so far for the company's annual Dreamforce event this week in San Francisco.