Oracle pools acquisitions for cloud-based social management suite
Oracle might not be the first company you think of presenting at a show like South by Southwest, but it was one of the first to get a product announcement out the door in Austin today.
See also: Oracle rolls out its Database Appliance X3-2
As the social enterprise wars continue to play out at the top among big wigs such as Microsoft, SAP and Salesforce.com, Oracle has unveiled what it had planned with the acquisitions of Vitrue, Collective Intellect, and Involver last year.
Essentially, the Redwood Shores, Calif.-based corporation is pooling all of these together (along with Oracle's own cloud infrastructure that debuted last year) to create one big collaboration platform, dubbed Oracle Social Relationship Management (SRM).
While the name is a bit dry (especially for the typical startup-friendly crowds at SXSW), the basic premise is simple enough.
The SRM is touted as a complete social business solution that offers tools for social marketing, engagement and monitoring while publishing content across multiple channels in real-time.
Naturally, there's a big data component for churning out analytics, which ties in with Oracle's software arm. Delivered via the Oracle Cloud, the SRM also comes with "out-of-the-box integration" for Oracle Applications, notably Fusion CRM for digital marketers and sales teams.
While all of the advertised benefits (collaboration, real-time data, etc.) are all basically standard expectations for new social business platforms these days, Oracle's best bet is framing it as another piece in the puzzle for existing enterprise customers. Oracle has the hardware, software, and the cloud components, so that would eliminate any multi-vendor support woes.
What might be missing is more support for third-party apps, much like we're seeing on the cloud storage front from the likes of Google Drive and Box.
Nevertheless, Oracle boasts that it the resources in place for multi-national businesses to launch and scale social business solutions within a single company, citing localization for at least 29 languages as just one example to get this done.