The cloud trend in technology started fifteen years ago where the early players were moving fast to the cloud and even just four years ago analysts were critical of Oracle that they were late to the game. Oracle may have missed the big market moves to the cloud in CRM and HR to Salesforce and Workday, but it is top of mind for Oracle as the foundation for their future growth strategy in taking back CRM and HR and winning outright a new cloud game – the “marketing cloud”.

This marketing cloud marketplace is the new lucrative market and battleground for the coveted and growing set of marketing and sales applications.  Oracle is investing heavily to win the battle for the marketing cloud, and the dividends are starting to appear.

In talking to analysts and customers a clear pattern is emerging that telegraph’s Oracle’s long-term play.  They are building an integrated technology and business model that looks like Amazon Web Service (AWS) and Apple.

Technology Plan Be Like AWS

The 1990’s and 2000’s were all about the rise of the CIO and the IT organization.  Today, it’s not about the CIO and IT groups, but mobile, consumer, data, and business driven outcomes such as winning new customers and keeping existing customers. With the powerful infrastructure now in place in most organizations to support low cost utility computing available from Amazon Web Services (AWS), businesses are able to quickly stand up fast and agile new and mission critical applications.  This capability is rapidly extending to marketing groups who are now utilizing this new found compute power to build a whole new class of use cases and applications called the marketing cloud.

SOURCE: forbes.com