Oracle is sending a message to marketers that it is serious about its cloud offerings.
The company rolled out the red carpet for 300 marketers at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City on Wednesday, talking about its marketing products -- acquisitions included -- as a unified set for the first time.
"This has now become a big business for us," said Oracle President Mark Hurd. "From a cloud revenue perspective, this is hundreds of millions of dollars for us. This is a material, core vertical and it's a material part in terms of where we think profit will grow."
In its most recently completed quarter, Oracle generated $9.3 billion in revenue.
Oracle has been one of the most aggressive companies in building a comprehensive suite of cloud marketing offerings, snapping up marketing-automation companies Eloqua and Responsys, and data-management platform BlueKai over the past two years. The field is intensely competitive, with Salesforce, IBM, Adobe, SAP, among others, also building out their offerings.
Now the company is figuring out how they all fit together, which Mr. Hurd addressed in a brief Q&A session.
"The fact that everything ever works perfectly together, anybody who tells you that is pulling your leg," Mr. Hurd told one marketer in attendence. "There will never be a day where the depth of integration, unless it was all built from the bottom ground up, will be integrated as any of us would like." Still, he said, Oracle will continue to integrate its cloud marketing products. "We will execute on that," he said.
Mr. Hurd also hinted that it will continue to beef up its offering. "We're going to drive this marketing cloud," he said. "Which means for us, continuing to add depth and breadth from a capability perspective."
No word on whether that means more acquisitions, though the company's track record would point that way.
Ad Age spoke with Oracle Senior VP product development Reggie Bradford at the event. In the video below, he discusses Oracle's vision for its marketing cloud, and what b-to-b marketers can expect from the company:
