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Oracle added some more substance to its cloud-building initiative Feb. 24 when it revealed it will acquire online data management startup BlueKai to bolster its marketing platform.
Terms of the transaction were not revealed by Oracle, the world’s No. 2-selling software maker behind Microsoft. A recent report by Business Insider indicated the deal may have been worth about $400 million.
BlueKai, a Cupertino, Calif.-based neighbor of Apple, positions itself as a company that personalizes marketing and advertising for consumers. It makes three products: an interconnected media-independent data management platform, an audience data marketplace and a big data analytics system.
Enterprises are able to connect all their own data assets and put them to use everywhere in order to make the business more intelligent and efficient for each online user.
Using BlueKai, customers can collect and analyze online ad data from online and offline marketing campaigns to discover customer tendencies. Advertising–plus geo-positioning information–now is all about personalization; this is a key marketing tool that Oracle lacked in its marketing platform.
Oracle has been on a cloud-tool acquisition binge lately. In December, it bought Web-based marketing software maker Responsys for about $1.39 billion, and a year previously it added marketing automation software provider Eloqua.
The Redwood City, Calif.-based all-purpose IT giant is centering its new Oracle Cloud offerings on the Oracle 12c database. CEO Larry Ellison has said that Oracle expects its newest database to be the “foundation of a modern cloud,” thanks to its multi-tenancy capability at the database layer.
Having that functionality at that level enables a system to avoid multi-tenancy using virtual machines, which not only affect performance but also can become the origin of security problems.
Oracle’s shares closed at $38.14 Feb. 24 on the New York Stock Exchange.