Oracle recently announced it’s agreement to acquire Eloqua, an analytic cloud marketing resource, for $871M, to be completed during the first six months of 2013. Eloqua employs about 400 people, mostly in northern Virginia, and is about 13 years old.

What does Eloqua do?
Here’s a recent mission capsule voiced by CEO, Joe Payne and CTO, Steve Woods as part of a joint statement on the occasion of the acquisition announcement, which appeared on Eloqua’s corporate press blog.

Modern marketing, at its core, involves a deep understanding the buyer. Eloqua enables this by bringing together an understanding of both the “facts” that we can know about a buyer and their “actions”. The facts, such as their title, role, and industry guide us towards understanding if they are likely buyers of our services at some point in the future. Their actions, such as their web visits, searches, social actions, event attendance, and video views, help us understand their intentions and interests at a current moment in time. With this insight in hand, modern marketing can then focus on how best to connect with that buyer; what message, delivered when, how, and from whom, will best catch their attention.

This slideshow gives an inkling about Eloqua’s marketing chops, and details their take on personalized branding enroute to fulfilling their über-goal: “It’s all about the Revenue!” Their Eloqua Expert service places a cloud marketing resource within a company’s decision making team regarding advertising and revenue growth efforts, and is used by smaller firms to kickstart such strategies.

What is Oracle’s strategy?
Oracle intends to make Eloqua the centerpiece of it’s Marketing Cloud, as mentioned thrice in this FAQ defending the acquisition. A number of large companies are already Eloqua clients.

More than 1,200 organizations across a wide range of industries – including HP, Nuance, Comcast, LinkedIn, Box, Google and Adobe – and 100,000 global users are said to rely on Eloqua’s modern marketing cloud to automate complex marketing processes across multiple channels… Customers are better able to track, capture and analyze a potential buyer’s Digital Body Language, including their preferences, behavior and decision-making processes, to more accurately score and qualify leads.

Is that a fun marketspeak term or what: digital body language? The graphic below is an overview of Oracle’s current cloud offerings and stance.

Reactions
ReadWriteWeb, which lately looks askance upon Oracle’s agglomerative ways as well as it’s advertising bravado, wonders about possible corporate indigestion. Fair question, but there is nothing hostile in the acquisition. More like keeping up with the cloud feeding frenzy. Perhaps this investor’s overview from Seeking Alpha offers enough of a rosy outlook to serve as a Swedish bitter.

~RS