Oracle‘s announcement last week of an agreement to buy Datalogix, a company that collects information from retailers and shares it with big advertising partners, is the latest in Oracle’s effort to assert itself as the leading vendor for marketers.

Oracle did not announce terms of the deal, but industry analyst Brian Wieser of Pivotal Research estimated it was in the high “hundreds of millions of dollars.”

The deal, announced during the slow days of the holiday season, was bound to miss the radars of a lot of marketers, and is worth looking at more closely. It’s one heck of a Christmas gift to Oracle’s sales force.

That’s because Oracle needed some urgent ammunition in its arsenal to go up against Adobe and Salesforce, which have gotten kudos lately from analysts for leading the way in marketing software technology. Adobe, specifically, has emerged as the leading “marketing cloud” vendor, or seller of cloud software tools that let companies market to other companies.

SOURCE: venturebeat.com