Oracle: The Forgotten Marketing Cloud
Oracle's martech portfolio is often unfairly dismissed as an outdated platform for large enterprise. Yet, they're actually at the forefront of B2B marketing.
Eloqua was one of the pioneers of marketing automation at a time when digital marketing was in its infancy. It remained at the forefront of the martech community, even after the acquisition by Oracle in 2012. There has been some attrition in the size of the Eloqua customer base due to a drift among smaller customers to less expensive platforms. However, it maintains a steady market presence, particularly among large enterprises with complex governance or integration requirements.
Yet, Eloqua's status within the industry has declined, along with Oracle's position as a thought leader in marketing technology. It is now perceived as a legacy platform, even though it still receives plenty of development and a steady stream of new features from Oracle. The platform was a notable early adopter of AI, a capability which was recently extended to include Generative AI features. That's a significant advantage compared to the relative lack of AI capabilities in several rival marketing automation platforms.
The Unity Stack
Oracle have developed a comprehensive tech stack to complement Eloqua, but a combination of pricing, reputation and complexity have held back adoption. Marketing technology is still a key focus area for the company though, a status which was reiterated at their annual Cloudworld conference last week. For instance, Oracle's recent decision to exit the ad business was justified as an attempt to prioritise first-party data technologies within a more privacy-conscious marketing environment.
At the heart of the new product focus is the development of the Oracle Unity CDP, which has become the centrepiece of Oracle's marketing story. Unity and the broader Fusion marketing product portfolio can be combined to create a fully integrated stack for both B2B and B2C use cases. A lot of effort has been put into integrating Eloqua with Unity so that Oracle can sell an end-to-end package that encompasses the sales and service components of Oracle Fusion as well as the marketing technologies.
New Features
The key announcements from Oracle's recent Cloudworld customer conference reflected this theme. They introduced buying group detection and opportunity scoring directly into the Unity CDP. Those are not features unique to Oracle. The entire industry has been launching similar features recently. However, integrating them into the CDP is new, rather than following Adobe in introducing it as a separate product or Salesforce in leveraging CRM for these capabilities.
An account profile view has been added to the Unity UI as well - which combines customer marketing data and sales data in CRM with ERP data on commercial relationships. The new view allows both marketing and sales teams to see a single view of accounts that everyone is working on, with the objective of agreeing on common target lists as well as a shared view of customer status across the entire customer lifecycle.
Enterprise First
Oracle definitely pitch their integration capabilities as a key differentiator for their marketing cloud product portfolio. This has allowed them to maintain market share among users of Oracle's CRM or ERP solutions. However, Oracle's sales products have been struggling with declining mind share and market share for years, struggles which have bled into their marketing portfolio.
Compare that to Salesforce, who have been able to build a marketing cloud on the back of their market-leading CRM platform. Meanwhile, Adobe and HubSpot have proven reputations for marketing innovation. Oracle are very much an enterprise database company, despite their attempts to diversify. They do tout the undoubted robustness of the Eloqua API and the flexibility of Eloqua integrations, but that's not sufficient to win new customers. The competition is good enough in these areas, while offering a better story in the core marketing capabilities. Which just proves that an enterprise focus on its own is not enough.
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