Oracle Acquires Maxymiser: Is this ‘Max’ Personalization at Scale?

Oracle’s recent acquisition of personalization and behavioral targeting firm Maxymiser is in line with our vision of the emerging “end-to-end” personalization ecosystem, and should help Oracle maintain par with other “marketing cloud” and service provider competitors.

Fueled by the adoption of social and mobile technologies, consumers are no longer willing to engage with brands that broadcast to the mass market, rather they are looking for brands that provide products, services, support, and an overall customer experience that is tailored to each individual consumer.

Oracle’s acquisition of Maxymiser, a provider of personalization and behavioral targeting solutions, is designed to help bring this ability into the Oracle Marketing Cloud. Maxymiser:

• Brings a proven set of omnichannel and web/mobile/email software tools to test different personalization schemes (A/B, multivariate) and enable real-time behavioral targeting of consumers.
• Is a relative industry veteran, founded in 2006 (total VC investments of $15M+) and handling over 20 billion consumer “engagements” per month.
• Touches a wide range of verticals (over 250 brands/clients), including:
• Finance & Insurance (HSBC, Hiscox, Virgin Money, Assurant),
• Retail (Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, Teleflora),
• Transportation & Hospitality (Lufthansa, Wyndham, Ford), and
• Media (Virgin Media, HarperCollins).

From an industry perspective, this doesn’t shake things up as much as it clarifies the inevitable competition between SaaS providers (Oracle, Salesforce, Adobe, etc.) and Service Providers, who are undergoing their own end-to-end ecosystem transformation (examples include the recent Wipro acquisition of design agency Designit and the Cognizant acquisition of digital marketing agency Cadient – both designed to extend their reach into the digital consumer ecosystem).

From Oracle’s perspective, this is one step in an ongoing acquisition strategy to build out their Marketing Cloud and move one step closer to the consumer (enabling a back-office/front-office integrated solution). Prior Oracle acquisitions in this space include Eloqua (marketing automation) 2012, Responsys (email marketing) 2013, Compendium (content marketing) 2013, BlueKai (personalized campaign data) 2014, Datalogix (digital marketing data) 2014.

This is about owning the enterprise-consumer ecosystem (and potentially squeezing out the role of the Systems Integrator who excels in bringing together multi-vendor solutions).

Keys to success for Oracle include:

• Seamless integration of the Maxymiser tools along-side existing offerings (see our report on the effort by Salesforce in this area). The risks here include time-to-value and a potential weakening of value (inevitable if disparate systems are driven to common ground when integrated).
• Clearly articulating the integrated value proposition against competitive vendors and, increasingly, service providers who are targeting the same end-to-end ecosystem ownership within their enterprise clients.
• The development of a privacy/security toolset to handle what is expected to be a wider need/ability to share personal information throughout the Oracle stack.

While this is a good strategic acquisition for Oracle, it’s not a game changer – it brings them on par with the market, but doesn’t give them any significant competitive advantage at this time.

From an enterprise/brand perspective, the ability to deliver mass personalization at scale requires the deployment of new technologies and the realigning of business processes – not just within their marketing or front-office organizations, but throughout their entire ecosystem.

If broadcast defined the B2C model in the 20^th century, personalization defines the 21^st century consumer model. Brands who do not build or enable the appropriate infrastructure to deliver mass personalization at scale will fail.

Enterprises should:

• Consider the merits/risks of single-vendor/provider ownership of the customer ecosystem (ex: tighter integration vs loss of flexibility).
• Ensure their back-office and front-office teams are working effectively to enable consumer personalization and customer experience.
• Expect further consolidation of consumer-oriented tools and services, potentially restricting options moving forward (even as we expect a continued wave of new entrants who will compete for market and vendor/provider mindshare).