Oracle has added yet another component to its growing enterprise cloud-services business.
The general-purpose IT giant launched Oracle Commerce Cloud in a not-too-subtle swipe at top competitor Salesforce.com—which, according to Gartner Research, owns about 18 percent of the market in cloud-based customer relationship management, while Oracle is third with about 12 percent. SAP is second with 14 percent.
Oracle Commerce Cloud, announced June 29, becomes a center point of the Oracle Customer Experience app portfolio that runs on—you guessed it—the Oracle Public Cloud. Oracle described Commerce Cloud as a “flexible and scalable SaaS solution” that simplifies IT management.
In the Oracle Public Cloud lineup, Commerce joins clouds for Marketing, Sales, Service, Configure, Price, Quote and Social.
Key features include the following.
—New commerce capabilities: Unified catalog, commerce, search and navigation, pricing, merchandising, design and content management capabilities give customers control to modify their sites as they see fit and instantly preview site experiences with drag-and-drop tools before going live. Out-of-the-box themes, layouts and modular widgets make it simple to get started, while enabling developers to build custom extensions or quickly and easily integrate extensions.
—Customization and extension: Marketers and merchandisers can create compelling commerce experiences across a range of devices with responsive design and HTML5 user interfaces. Exposing APIs lets businesses build additional functionality or develop integrations that connect Commerce Cloud with their other systems while also allowing easy consumption for third-party development efforts.
—Modern cloud environment: It sports an agency-friendly architecture that allows users to deploy JavaScript frameworks to simplify implementation and adoption, API-first architecture and a modern HTML5 user interface. Integrations with other Oracle applications via platform as a service (PaaS), Java Cloud and Developer Cloud help brands quickly plug into other Oracle Cloud Applications or third-party technologies.