“The best breed has jumped over the shark. The ship has sailed.”
Oracle EVP and General Manager of CX Rob Tarkoff knew he was mixing his tropes. Nevertheless, the message was clear. Marketers need no more standalone tools. I need a platform.
This is not a new message from Oracle. In 2015, the late Mark Hurd, then CEO of Oracle, predicted that by 2027 he would have two marketing suites making up his 80% of the market. He apparently thought the Oracle was the one too.
But since then, there has been a proliferation of “frankenstacks” (poorly integrated custom stacks patched and patched from multiple sources) and a model of centralized marketing solutions with a myriad of pluggable partner apps. have gone through several stages. And play.
None of this works for Tarkoff.
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One Streamlined Process
“What needs to happen today,” he said. [marketing] Building a campaign with a multi-channel touch requires integrating your flows into one streamlined process, one data model, one set of interactions, and one clear end-to-end process. “
Oracle claims to have built just that through the development of Oracle Fusion Marketing, a solution that supports the execution of multiple campaigns across advertising, email and other channels. “We built this system to get rid of the crazy notion that the point he keeps adding applications,” he explained. Another breakthrough for him, according to Turkoff, is the integration of Oracle Unity CDP with his marketing, orchestration, content and advertising platform.
Oracle certainly blends CX and advertising, but Tarkoff acknowledges that the work they’ve done is primarily useful for B2B marketers. “We’ve written a lot of code over the past few years,” he said.
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App Marketplaces Don’t Solve Problems
Obvious competitors such as Salesforce and HubSpot seek the best of both worlds, offering not only extensive proprietary suites of solutions, but also giant competitors featuring best-of-breed solutions configured to integrate with their own platforms. It also operates an app marketplace. But Turkov believes this approach is less of a best of both worlds than a method of hedging bets.
“I think it’s a way of hedging bets that don’t really solve the problem,” he told us. “Sure, we have partners. Just saying it’s your job to coordinate doesn’t solve the problem. Keep it simple.”
Simplicity and efficiency are his watchwords. “I haven’t seen a model where having an app marketplace actually increases the effectiveness of marketers. We are not closing, which means we are complete.
Wouldn’t that also mean that Oracle customers would effectively become “Oracle Shops” and be locked into the Oracle suite instead of allowing “composability”?
“Honestly, with SaaS we deliver as a service. We don’t deploy software on-premises, so we don’t get locked in. As long as the service provides value, we can keep it. increase.
Machine learning built in
Another differentiator between Oracle and high-profile competitors such as Adobe and Salesforce is the lack of AI capabilities tags (Sensei or Einstein). Nor has it made any big announcements about adopting generative AI. There is no equivalent for Einstein GPT or Sensei GenAI.
Turkov says there’s a reason for this. “Oracle has always had a development approach of embedding AI and machine learning into every application. Rather than using a teacher or Einstein or an additional AI layer, we put machine learning into every core his flow. Incorporated.
One example is the “completely revamped” conversational UI called Redwood. “In that UI, we’ve enabled a lot of machine learning flows to be captured in conversational form.” I hope you get a response. “
This doesn’t mean Oracle isn’t paying attention to generative AI. “Like many, we are experimenting with what that means across marketing, sales and service concepts. We’re all doing the same experiment, and the difference with Oracle is that we don’t want to hype things that don’t feel like true innovations. I don’t believe it, it’s just a completely different direction.”
He also points out the need for good governance, especially at the corporate level. He mentioned an inadvertent leak by a Samsung engineer. “Some engineer put the code in his ChatGPT and tried to debug it, but it was proprietary code.” Providing a large language model with proprietary customer information is also a significant problem.
“It’s in the hype stage,” he concluded. “It’s a new toy for everyone and a productivity boost, but I think there’s a lot to understand.”
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