Overview
Oracle recently welcomed a number of analysts at its Redwood Shores campus for a two-day series of sessions aimed at highlighting Oracle’s latest developments. While many analyst days can be a bit of a summary of a lot of “what we already know,” Oracle revealed a number of innovations and product visions combining its recent streamlining of its Fusion apps portfolio, investments in its customer data platform, and new Gen AI tools.
When it comes to go‑to‑market, Oracle is building an interesting story here. Long gone are the days of Eloqua being the cornerstone of a siloed, individual GTM applications. Now the company has brought together apps, data and workflow (with some AI thrown in) to build a novel approach to lead-to-cash optimization, building towards a direction that looks a lot like a ‘holistic’ GTM Tech Stack.
There is still a lot of work to be done, but Oracle has started down a path of making it far easier for organizations to orchestrate key engagements across critical phases of the customer journey. And it is equipping marketing and sales (and a lot more pre-and-post sale stakeholders in general) with more data and automation due to the fact that it has done a lot of work making its Fusion apps more seamlessly integrated from a data and workflow perspective to better support GTM motions in a more fluid manner.
GTM Innovation
Oracle revealed a number of innovations and new product capabilities that indicate the company has a solid understanding of what is needed for a more holistic approach to GTM technology, and GTM optimization in general. While the company has been busy building out its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) which has driven a lot of the company’s recent growth; the company has also built out a solid Customer Data Platform (CDP) play that rivals that of other CRM and CX leaders.
Moving towards a holistic GTM Tech Stack?
Over the past few years, Oracle has completed the seemingly herculean task of moving all of its application offerings on to OCI, supported by its CDP, and branded under the Fusion Applications moniker. This includes more than 14 acquired companies in addition to more legacy Oracle application technology. The end result is a pre-integrated set of application suites, delivered in the cloud. During its analyst day, the company notes that all customers using Fusion apps are on the same version of the application, streamlining the maintenance and upgrade process for customers while also ensuring customers have the latest and greatest features as soon as possible. Given the rapid nature of innovation due to Gen AI and other drivers, this is a solid benefit.
Oracle demonstrated a number of these new applications, and for what it’s worth it looks like the actual integration work has been done. There is some fit and finish, and some more streamlining to do – but the hard work has been completed.
So this means users can access dozens of composable, cloud applications ranging from Marketing Automation, Sales Automation, Supply Chain, Commerce, HCM, Call Center and Customer Support/CX and more … and all of these tools ‘talk to each other’ and can trigger workflows that span one application to another. Basically, Oracle is building an entire front-to-back office set of suites meant to automate engagement with the customer lifecycle end-to-end. In ANNUITAS terms, it is building a holistic GTM Tech Stack to help companies orchestrate engagement from end-to-end.
AI for ALL
Oracle has, like its competitors, seemingly gone all in on GenAI. The company says it has made more that 50 AI-powered features generally available in the past year. However, there are a few wrinkles to Oracle’s AI strategy that make it stand out. The company says it sees GenAI tools as “just another feature” and will not charge Fusion Application customers for new GenAI and other AI-powered features, ever. Also, given its large installed base, Oracle says it is gaining strong telemetry of AI usage uptake across its wide array off applications, helping it both train AI models but also better gather feedback and insights on how to best build the AI user experience and feature set.
The existing features are not light, either. Oracle has its version of the GenAI “Copilots” we have seen from other vendors. These feature sets include your usual prompt-based tools that provide some content recommendations for marketing campaigns, etc. However, Oracle also demonstrated an internal use of AI which essentially allows users to build personalized, ABM-like campaigns off of core messaging and enables an automatic (yet human curated) process of building out messages, landing pages, and other personalized content based on the prospects profile, past purchase history (another benefit of Oracle having strong visibility into ERP data), and the context of their recent engagements. It’s essentially “ABM in a box” and while internal, we expect Oracle to make this available to existing customers. Note: much of this functionality is still based on the core Eloqua platform. So, legacy users may not have a huge undertaking (though some considerable reconfiguring) to upgrade to the Fusion Marketing offering.
Another standout AI feature is a customer reference generator that takes into account the prospect’s pain points and builds customer reference content specifically for their use case, industry, etc. Again, if a company were to build this into their Conversation Track Architecture, it could be a strong way of personalizing engagement with true “customer voices” while also staying on message and avoiding random acts of marketing that can happen if AI is allowed to run rampant inside a GTM team.
Oracle also pointed out that it is dedicated to promoting responsible data stewardship for its customers when it comes to AI. One of the benefits of building on the Oracle Cloud is it can stand up more private and proprietary large language models (LLMs) to better support large enterprises or build out more useful AI use cases for vertical industries.
Landscape Implications
The pricing and packaging innovations, and the value-added approach to GenAI should have companies like Salesforce concerned. While Salesforce has been a thought leader, and in a lot of cases a leader in delivering AI products so far, Oracle brings something different to the table. In addition to the ‘no charge’ AI, Oracle building a bundle of enterprise apps all under one platform that spans Marketing Automation, CRM, CX, Commerce, Supply Chain, RevOps etc., is significant. If Oracle has truly ported these apps as a pre-integrated set of suites – all sharing one customer data set and enabling end-to-end GTM processes – Salesforce should be on notice.
And this points to an even bigger picture, or issues, with the overall enterprise applications landscape. Companies like SAP have fallen off the innovation radar when it comes to providing modern, innovative GTM tools. Companies like Microsoft and HubSpot are doing interesting things, but they do not have the “Enterprise” muscle in terms of install base and experience that Oracle has owned for decades. It may sound hyperbolic, but Oracle has the components to take a serious chunk of market share in what we see as the emerging enteprirse GrowthOps / GTMOps space.
ANNUITAS Take
We often look to CRM vendors to be the cornerstone of a GTM Tech Stack. But, there are so many data sources and systems that need to feed a successful Customer Data Value Chain and a winning GTM execution strategy. Oracle has a lot of these with its CPQ, Supply Chain, ERP and other offerings that complement not just the CRM, but a more holistic approach to GTM.
Add in the AI angle, where Oracle customers can point the AI to more inclusive and expansive data sets – and a compelling story of how Oracle can power a new approach to GrowthOps / GTMOps, not just CRM and core GTM tech. In short, Oracle has some valuable “puzzle pieces” across CRM, CX, MARTECH, and ERP/SCM that make it a potential serious contender as a single vendor offering a holistic GTM stack that covers a large swath of the pre-and-post sale engagement and optimization needed to build a Converged Growth GTM Organization.
