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Oracle acquires BlueKai, rounds out its marketing cloud

With the acquisition, Oracle keeps BlueKai, a key provider of data management platforms, away from rivals while boosting its marketing cloud.
Written by Larry Dignan, Contributor

Oracle said Monday that it will acquire BlueKai, which has a data management platform used by marketers in a deal that's strategic for the software giant.

Terms of the deal weren't disclosed, but analysts said the purchase was probably about $400 million. Oracle will get access to more than 700 million profiles.

BlueKai's platform is used by marketers to personalize marketing campaigns. BlueKai's software takes a company's proprietary data on its customers and augments it with other information in one reposititory.

Cowen & Co. analyst Peter Goldmacher said the purchase is small, but strategic for Oracle. First, Oracle keeps BlueKai and its data management platform (DMP) away from rivals. And BlueKai is critical to marketing automation.

For Oracle, BlueKai fills in a hole in its marketing cloud. BlueKai will be lumped in with Responsys and Eloqua, two companies also acquired by Oracle.

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In a letter to customers, Steve Miranda, executive vice president of applications at Oracle, said:

BlueKai will be integrated with both Responsys for B2C marketing automation and Eloqua for B2B marketing automation in order to deliver orchestrated and personalized customer interactions across all marketing activities and channels... The combination will also allow both B2B and B2C organizations to build unmatched personalized cross-channel campaigns and customer interactions across e-mail, web, social, mobile, advertising and syndicated content channels.

Goldmacher said:

We optimistically estimate BlueKai was a $40M-ish revenue business. While we think it is a great acquisition for Oracle both offensively and defensively, we don’t think it moves the needle.

Goldmacher added that if anything Oracle's purchase of BlueKai validates that marketing automation assets of Adobe, which has an integrated suite and acquired Demdex, another DMP player, in early 2011.

Here's how Oracle will position BlueKai and aim to sell it with its other cloud offerings. 

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