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.