The News: To help marketers simplify the delivery of personalized marketing programs that increase sales, improve customer satisfaction, and grow customer lifetime value, Oracle today announced a series of new innovations within its customer data platform (CDP). The latest updates to Oracle Unity enable B2B and B2C marketers to eliminate costly and complex customer data integration projects by providing a single platform that unifies all customer data and enables it to be quickly and easily activated within existing business processes. Read the release here.
Analyst Take: This week’s Oracle Live event had a broad array of announcements that spanned its CRM, ERP, CX, SCM, HCM and Project Management tools. Yes, a lot of acronyms, but those that need and use these solutions most certainly understand what they are.
One are that I have been paying a lot of attention to has been the CDP, aka the Customer Data Platform. This particular technology, which gives users the ability to truly see a complete and actionable view of the customer, has seen tremendous uplift in interest in the past year with Oracle, Microsoft, Adobe, Salesforce and a dozen other exciting companies (Segment, Treasure Data, SAP, etc) s all competing in the space. Oracle’s desire to win meaningful business in the market should surprise nobody, and with the announcements it made at this year’s Oracle Live event, the company is betting big on its Oracle CX Unity offering.
The problem with CDP’s, at least historically, is that it is a significant challenge to ingest and manage all of the data that it takes to truly gain visibility to this full customer view. With its announcements, I believe Oracle is improving these capabilities.
What Did Oracle CX Unity Unveil at Oracle CX?
The latest updates to Oracle Unity include:
- New B2B Marketing Capabilities: Oracle Unity proclaims to be the first CDP to support both B2C and B2B marketers and yesterday it announced a tool For B2B marketers that included a new B2B data schema that relates contact data to an account.Take: This enables marketers to gain insights about key accounts and build audiences that are account specific. This will be accomplished via an Oracle Unity and Oracle Eloqua integration, which takes account specific insights from Unity and builds automated marketing programs targeted at specific accounts. I believe this is an important capabilities for ABM efforts–especially in B2B.
- New Behavioral Data Capabilities: Oracle Unity updates now include a real-time behavioral data collection and a set of personalization capabilities powered by what the company calls Oracle Infinity, which is a data streaming and analytics solution that brings in and connects customer data with the intent of delivering real-time actionable intelligence at scale.Take: I particularly like this enhancement as I believe in the growing importance of machine learning for marketing and effective CDP utilization. This new capability should provide marketers a vehicle to apply machine learning to customer behavioral data to personalize customer interactions across websites, campaigns, and ads.
- New Data Collection and Importing Capabilities: Oracle Unity announced enhancements to its ability to support users across the Oracle Fusion Cloud stack by providing a universal digital tag across all Oracle Fusion Cloud Customer Experience (CX) applications as well as customer websites, mobile apps, or other digital properties.Take: This capability meets a growing need for marketers seeking to simplify the collection and importing of real-time data for both known and unknown customers.
- New Ad Activation Capabilities: Oracle Unity is now fully integrated with the Oracle Data Management Platform (DMP).Take: This is an important and straight forward integration that enables marketers to categorize unknown website visitors by interest and drive more targeted and desirable experiences across digital channels.
- New Partner Integrations: The company also announced a couple of new integrations for Oracle CX Unity with Sourcepoint and OneTrust. These integrations were presented as valuable for expediting time-to-value for marketers as well as support for achieving compliance goals that are impacted by continuous shifting consumer data privacy and security regulations. (Details via Oracle Release)
- Sourcepoint: A new integration between the Sourcepoint Consent Management Platform and Oracle Unity will help mutual customers maintain consent records that are quickly and easily accessible in real time.
- OneTrust: A new integration between the OneTrust PreferenceChoice platform and CX Unity will help customers achieve their privacy regulations (CCPA, GDPR, LGPD, and more) by collecting consent and preferences through web forms, cookie banners, in-person events, and more to ensure customer choices are honored throughout marketing systems.
Overall Impressions of Oracle CX Unity Updates at Oracle Live
The CDP space will continue to gain competitiveness in the coming years. Oracle’s enhancements will certainly make CX Unity a more complete offering.
As we progress in this space, I see two focal areas for CDPs. The expansion for software companies offering sales, marketing and service tools seeking to integrate data into a more complete data platform, but also a trend toward open platforms that integrate with data across a wide variety of stacks.
When it comes to the CDP, the ones that can most seamlessly ingest and manage the most complete set of data while delivering insights both quickly and at scale, will emerge as the preferred platforms. It’s a crowded space, but there is room for many players here and I see Oracle certainly being one to keep an eye on.
Futurum Research provides industry research and analysis. These columns are for educational purposes only and should not be considered in any way investment advice.
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Image: Oracle
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Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
