Act-On Adaptive Web

Congratulations, Oracle & Responsys!

Article Outline

With the acquisition of Responsys, Oracle now has legitimate solutions for every stage of the complete customer lifecycle (B2B and B2C marketing, sales, support, and last but not least, billing & accounting).  Oracle has long owned the enterprise back office. Now, they are signaling that they plan to own the enterprise front-office as well.

This acquisition validates Act-On’s long term vision around the importance of the end-to-end customer lifecycle. Fortunately, it does not negatively impact our business, since we operate in the mid-market segment. (We do not compete with Responsys, and only very occasionally with Eloqua.)

I am thinking this acquisition is bad news for Salesforce or Marketo.

Salesforce  now has a formidable competitor for the Marketing Cloud that they have so expensively acquired. On the B2C side, Oracle/Responsys is (and always has been) clearly superior to Salesforce/Exact Target, and on the B2B side, Oracle/Eloqua easily trumps Salesforce/Pardot. Whoops!

As for Marketo, the enterprise segment just got that much tougher. There have been rumors of Salesforce gunning for them, with a bounty program for Marketo customer takeaways. And now here comes Oracle with a complete story for the big company CMO.

On a personal note, I am thrilled by Oracle’s acquisition of Responsys, since I had the good fortune to be one of the founders of Responsys.

 

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