I heard Mark Hurd and Thomas Kurian today in an Oracle webcast about its recent Eloqua acquisition. I was impressed Thomas did most of the talking about how it will integrate with Oracle’s other CRM acquisitions – RightNow for service management, its social CRM tools, its Siebel and other SFA capabilities. He talked about how Eloqua will be enhanced for global marketing campaigns with different privacy and spam laws across countries. Eloqua has long had a “Digital Body Language” vision – with Oracle’s other assets it has a better chance to evolve beyond an email campaign tool.
A few weeks ago, they presented to a more technical audience in another Oracle webcast about its Cloud – particularly its Platform and Infrastructure as a Service.
At OOW last year, in a one on one I asked Mark if there was a particular business function he felt most comfortable with and he rattled off compensation planning, logistics and marketing scenarios. At another point he mentioned out he dealt with 750 business processes at HP labs, supply chain and other units.
In another OOW session I was impressed with Thomas’s knowledge of vertical processes around various Oracle products like Retek for retail and Flexcube for Banking.
Their command of such a wide range of Oracle’s wide, in many ways unwieldy, product portfolio and their ability to talk in business and technical tongues must make them a huge asset in sales situations.
