It’s been a year since Bluekai’s a¬cquisition by the software giant Oracle to further its “Oracle Marketing Cloudâ€. At the time this acquisition was driven to plug in the marketing cloud stack with Bluekai’s Data management platform. Former CEO of Bluekai, Omar Tawakol, now general manager of the Oracle marketing cloud is now heading a series of acquisitions that is aimed at strengthening Oracle Marketing Cloud.
The very recent Datalogix acquisition by Oracle is a part of that series. Much details about the acquisition remain in the dark, starting with the value of the deal. Interesting to note that while Tawakol is the one who nudged oracle towards this acquisition, Datalogix was, in the past a competitor of Bluekai. Which raises the question: What is the purpose of this acquisition?
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Datalogix:
Datalogix was once celebrated in the online advertising world because it solves a very important and a really hard problem. It helps prove that an online ad campaign really makes people walk into the store and buy stuff. By using big data analysis, Datalogix was able to link analysed purchasing patterns, and match them to online ad campaigns to show how well a particular ad campaign worked.
Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook praised Datalogix a year ago for helping it show that Facebook ads indeed help advertisers drive sales.
In April, Google partnered with Datalogix and Acxiom to do the same. Datalogix had been working with Twitter, too, since August, 2013.
Half of the tech that allows Bluekai do this type of tracking is now already added to Oracle marketing cloud the other half that lets advertisers buy ads based on people’s online activities became a new cloud service that is run by Tawakol at Oracle.
Datalogix acquisition:
Oracle envisions the data cloud to be more than just help marketers advertise. It wants to be a service that sells data on what people are doing on the net for all kinds of stuff, ranging from marketing, sales, talent acquisition and business analysis.
Around the same time Datalogix was partnering with Google, it signed up with Salesforce which added Datalogix to its marketing cloud which is in fierce competition with Oracle’s very own marketing cloud. Salesforce may not be happy with Datalogix acquisition by Oracle.
Datalogix acquisition: How much did Oracle pay?
Oracle, apparently decided to keep the transactions side of the deal in the dark. While there have been speculations that Oracle paid $1 billion. Based on earlier bids as reported by adexchanger.com, it is highly unlikely that Oracle paid that sum.
According to a post on the adexchanger.com, Facebook was also in the bidding race to acquire Datalogix, bids starting at as low as $200 million. Facebook was later reported to have backed out from Datalogix acquisition.
Besides, given that Datalogix acquisition by Oracle is headed by Tawakol, it is hard to believe that he’d suggest buying his competitor at a price more than what his Bluekai had fetched, which is somewhere between $350 – $400 million.
Given that the bidding war had subsided completely. It is entirely plausible that Datalogix acquisition by Oracle could’ve gone as lower than the amount it spent on Bluekai.
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