Oracle Corp. will be buying marketing software company Responsys Inc., for about $27 a share, which works out to be about $1.5 billion.
The U.S.-based hardware and software giant made the announcement today, saying it was acquiring Responsys for its software in creating marketing emails, social media campaigns, and display ads. It’ll be adding Responsys’ products to the Oracle Customer Experience Cloud, expanding on offerings from the Oracle Marketing Cloud.
“Responsys has always been focused on helping marketers realize their largest opportunity – coordinating their marketing touch points across channels, across the customer lifecycle, and across industries, and as a part of Oracle, we will only accelerate our efforts,” said Responsys CEO Dan Springer, in a statement.
“Oracle not only shares our vision, but is the proven leader in bringing together best-in-class technologies and companies to realize the largest enterprise opportunities. We couldn’t be more excited about what this means for our customers and employees.”
The goal is to continue to do R&D, working towards providing “individualized experiences” in marketing, commerce, sales, service, and support, according to a press release from Oracle.
This isn’t the first acquisition Oracle has made as part of its bid to appeal to marketers. In October, Oracle announced it was acquiring content marketing startup Compendium to round out its marketing offerings, and it also scooped up Toronto-based Eloqua Corp. in December 2012.
“Recognizing the unique needs of the CMO in B2B and B2C industries, the Oracle Marketing Cloud is now the only platform to unite enterprise-class leaders in these historically distinct marketing-automation fields,” said Oracle president Mark Hurd, in a statement.
“Our strategy of combining the leaders across complementary technologies signifies Oracle’s overwhelming commitment to winning and serving the CMO better than any other software company in the world.”
The deal is expected to close sometime in the first half of 2014.