There is a misconception that consolidation in the marketing technology (martech) industry is forcing marketers to choose between best-of-breed technology providers and multi-solution suites. This misconception was exacerbated by an eMarketer article this past April which began with the very ominous-sounding warning: “The fluidity of the marketing technology space is making it harder than ever for marketers to choose between standalone best-of-breed tech providers and multi-solution suites.”
To further add to the misconception eMarketer principal analyst Lauren Fisher is quoted in the same article as saying: “Facing both challenges, marketers have a great deal of uncertainty on their hands.”
Fluid, Yes. Uncertainty, No.
Yes the world of martech is fluid. It is constantly changing and evolving. No one would argue that.
But when it comes to uncertainty and having to choose between best-of-breed technology providers and multi-solution suites, while this may be true for some marketing suite vendors and with all due respect to eMarketer, it is certainly not the case with Oracle Marketing Cloud. At Oracle, we believe that marketers should not have to make a trade-off between the depth of capabilities offered by best-of-breed products and breadth of integrations available within marketing suites.
The reality is that every marketing organization is at a different stage in their journey to marketing perfection. Let’s face it, as much as we all aspire to provide a relevant and contextual experience that is individualized, we are all on our own unique path to get to there. For this reason, the majority of our customers start with a single product, be that Oracle Responsys, to automate and increase the returns from their email campaigns or Oracle Eloqua, to help B2B marketers create and execute better nurture programs to drive higher quality leads to their direct sales teams, or Oracle Bluekai to leverage rich audience data to fuel targeted advertising.
For this reason, a core tenet of our product strategy for the OMC has been to acquire and integrate best-of-breed marketing applications.
Every acquired Oracle Marketing Cloud product can still be bought and used standalone, and most are still among the market leaders as standalone products.
Open and Connective
Openness and connectivity are key parts of the Oracle Marketing Cloud strategy. Oracle has more partner integrations via the Oracle AppCloud (with 400+ integrations) than any other marketing solutions provider and an open architecture that enables easy integration of data and processes. This enables marketers to get the most from each OMC product by ensuring it plays well with our customers’ existing marketing ecosystem. This is important and increases the power of each of the OMC products when used individually.
The good news for our customers is that they can choose to:
- Implement an individual best-in-class application to address a specific marketing process and integrate it into THEIR existing marketing ecosystem, or:
- Transform their entire marketing ecosystem to take advantage of a portfolio of integrated best-in-class applications that interoperate across all key marketing processes
The choice is yours to make based upon where you are in your journey to marketing excellence. Our product strategy is built around the fact that customers do not have to implement the entire stack to get immediate value from the Oracle Marketing Cloud. By implementing a single OMC product, they get the benefits of a market leading product in that category, with the peace of mind that you can grow and expand as your marketing maturity increases.
For additional guidance on choosing the right martech for your business, download The Guide To Building Your Marketing Technology Stack.
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