The battle of the marketing Clouds is hotting up with Oracle announcing the launch of its Adaptive Intelligence Applications (AIA) — a plug-and-play artificial-intelligence solution. According to Will Griffith, Regional Vice-President - Sales, Marketing Cloud, Oracle, who spoke to BusinessLine on the sidelines of the Oracle OpenWorld event here, the AIA is smart, will work in real time and is as easy to use as a mobilephone app.

“A lot of artificial intelligence propositions in the marketplace give you a tool kit, not a plug-and-play solution. Our AI app is like a mobilephone app. You just need to plug it in and it connects with Oracle Cloud solutions, whether in marketing, ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), sales or service, and is ready to go,” he says.

Adaptive Intelligence Offers To be launched later this year, among AIA’s first apps will be a marketing one called Adaptive Intelligence Offers. Griffith describes how if a company uses this in conjunction with its own first- and third-party data provided by Oracle Data Cloud, it could dramatically improve results for digital marketers. To put it simply, a company can use AI Offers powered by real-time analytics to deliver targeted advertising or customised offers on e-commerce sites.

The Oracle Data Cloud that came about after Oracle’s acquisition of BlueKai, a data-management platform, has more than 5 billion global consumers and business IDs, and is a wealth of information.

The marketing Cloud battleground — in which Adobe, IBM, Salesforce and Oracle are the four big players — is of late seeing the introduction of artificial-intelligence solutions riding on big data. Adobe, for instance, recently launched Adobe Sensei, a machine-learning platform that is getting embedded in all its offerings, to power digital experiences. IBM, meanwhile, is riding on Watson’s cognitive capabilities to offer personalisation solutions to marketers.

Acquisitions galore Oracle, Griffith reveals, is also betting on acquisitions to offer a more comprehensive suite of solutions. For instance, the company had announced the acquisition of Moat, a digital ad-measurement company, just last month. The deal has been valued at $850 million according to reports. In the past, Oracle has acquired Eluqua, a marketing automation platform; Responsys, an email-marketing solution, and Datalogix, an analytics firm.

Its rival Adobe, too, has done a spate of acquisitions — the latest being TubeMogul, a video-advertising platform.

According to analysts, these acquisitions are a way to solve the problem of a fragmented vendor landscape in the MarTech (marketing technology) space.

Says Sanchit Vir Gogia, CEO, GreyHound Research: “The aim that all behold is one, and simple — to be the most comprehensive marketing-Cloud technology company.

He says while the early mover advantage is clearly with Adobe, other vendors have made enough and more noise in the recent past. “After Adobe and Salesforce, Oracle comes across as the most aggressive in terms of their intent to acquire a dominant space in MarTech by the way of acquisitions.”

“More specifically, the decision to acquire BlueKai for data management has proved to be a differentiator,” he adds.

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