Oracle Acquires BlueKai Marketing Cloud

Oracle acquires marketing cloud provider BlueKai, Pivotal is joined by industry leaders to establish an open governance model for Cloud Foundry, and VMware launches its vCloud Hybrid Service in Europe.

Oracle acquires BlueKai.  Oracle (ORCL) announced it has signed an agreement to acquire cloud-based marketing provider BlueKai. The BlueKai solution includes its Data Management Platform, which centrally organizes a company’s customer and audience data in the cloud to help implement personalized marketing campaigns across all channels and deliver better results and higher marketing ROI. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but it was reported that Oracle paid more than $400 million. BlueKai also runs the world’s largest third party data marketplace to augment a company’s proprietary customer data with actionable information on more than 700 million profiles. Combining Oracle’s Marketing and Social solutions with BlueKai will give customers the ability to build the richest user profiles combining information from first party and third party sources including media, advertising, social, and mobile sources. BlueKai will be integrated with both Responsys for B2C marketing automation and Eloqua for B2B marketing automation. “Modern marketers require new ways of acquiring, centralizing, interpreting, and activating customer data across marketing channels so that they can enhance the customer experience and maximize the return on their marketing spend,” said Steve Miranda, Executive Vice President, Applications Development, Oracle. “The addition of BlueKai to the Oracle Marketing Cloud enables marketers to act on data across both known customers and new audiences and precisely target customers with a personalized message across all channels.”

Pivotal proposes open governance model for Cloud Foundry. Pivotal announced that it will move to establish a formal open governance model for the Cloud Foundry open source project. Founding Platinum sponsors of the independent non-profit foundation for the Cloud Foundry project include EMC, IBM, HP, Rackspace, SAP and VMware, with ActiveState and CenturyLink joining as Gold level founding sponsors. “As software continues to disrupt every aspect of business, enterprises want the ability to develop and deploy applications and have the freedom to seamlessly deploy those applications across a wide variety of cloud-based platforms,” said Paul Maritz, CEO, Pivotal. “The foundation for Cloud Foundry will bring together industry leaders committed to the growth of the open PaaS movement, working in concert toward the development of an open cloud architecture that will enable a broad, open ecosystem that will allow many to contribute and benefit, creating applications and services that have major impact on business and our everyday lives.” In a blog post Pivotal CEO Paul Maritz discusses how Cloud Foundry has evolved from an open source project into a true open platform ecosystem.

VMware vCloud Hybrid launched in Europe.  VMware (VMW) announced the general availability of VMware vCloud Hybrid Service in Europe from a data center in Slough, UK. Complementing VMware's existing US data centers, the Slough data center provides customers with a European location that addresses UK and EU compliance and data sovereignty demands. A recent survey of 200 VMware enterprise customers in the UK conducted by Vanson Bourne, an independent and specialist market research provider for the global technology sector, revealed that 86 percent of respondents believe that it is important to ensure their business critical data is stored with a UK-based cloud service provider. "Customer response to the UK public beta of VMware vCloud® Hybrid Service™ has been tremendous," said Bill Fathers, senior vice president and general manager, Hybrid Cloud Services Business Unit, VMware. "VMware is uniquely positioned to deliver the best of both worlds: the compelling economics and agility of a public cloud, yet fully compatible with a customer's existing data center, applications, management tools, networking and security. As a result, VMware vCloud Hybrid Service solves key business issues allowing organizations to seamlessly extend their data centers to the cloud -- linking both private and public cloud together to create a truly hybrid cloud."