Oracle Buys Responsys For $1.5bn

Oracle has reached an agreement to acquire Responsys, a cloud marketing company, for $1.5bn (£945m) in cash, as Oracle continues to build up its cloud services portfolio.

The deal also continues a string of recent acquisitions involving marketing firms, including Salesforce.com’s purchase of ExactTarget earlier this year for $2.5bn, Adobe’s buyout of Neolane for $600m and Oracle’s own acquisition of Eloqua last year for $871m, as well as the purchase of Compendium in October. Microsoft has also been a player in this area, buying MarketingPilot in 2012.

Consolidation

Shares in cloud marketing firm Marketo, which went public earlier this year, rose 9 percent after the announcement of the Responsys deal on Friday as traders looked toward more consolidation in the sector. Potential buyers for Marketo could include NetSuite or SAP, according to a note to investors from FBR Capital Markets analyst Daniel Ives.

“Marketing automation is one of the hyper-growth areas within cloud,” Ives wrote, adding that “investors want Oracle to put more fuel in the growth engine”.

The Responsys deal has been approved by its board of directors, and is expected to close in the first half o 2014. It is, however, still subject to shareholder approval. Oracle’s offer of $27 per share is a premium of about 38 percent over Responsys’ Thursday closing price.

Oracle noted that with Responsys, which focuses on business-to-consumer marketing, and Eloqua, which specialises in business-to-business selling, the company is now in the rare position of being able to offer both types of marketing under one roof.

“The Oracle Marketing Cloud is now the only platform to unite enterprise-class leaders in these historically distinct marketing-automation fields,” said Oracle co-president Mark Hurd in a statement.

Cloud marketing

Responsys allows companies to run marketing campaigns across channels including email, the web and social media, as well as building customer profiles and tracking ad performance. Its customers include LinkedIn, Nordstrom, Southwest Airlines and United Healthcare.

Oracle said last week that bookings from selling cloud services had risen 25 percent in the company’s most recent quarter and wuold be one of the most important sources of growth in the coming year.

Do you know all about the Internet of Things? Take our quiz.