Hasta La Creative!

The marketing clouds are gathering. On Friday, tech giant Oracle expanded its marketing-services offerings with the acquisition of Responsys, a fifteen-year-old email marketing firm-turned one-stop digital marketing shop. For $1.5 billion, Oracle adds the firm’s email, social, mobile, display and web CRM technology to its Oracle Marketing Cloud.

The deal plants Oracle more firmly in place among a host of other companies that in recent years have snapped up marketing-tech firms to piece together suites of tools aimed at marketing chiefs. Salesforce, and, to some degree, Adobe and IBM are among the bigger players that have transitioned their businesses to include marketing-services divisions. Adobe, which morphed from a design-software provider to a marketing-services provider over the past few years, also calls its set of marketing tools a “marketing cloud.”

Still, Forrester Research analyst Rob Brosnan sees Salesforce as Oracle’s direct competitor. “This is a deal that’s about Salesforce and Salesforce only,” he said. While Adobe has its sights set mainly on serving marketers, he added, “Salesforce and Oracle are about serving your whole company from sales to service and marketing.”

Continue reading at AdAge.com