Oracle has quietly added what appears to be a very powerful big data tool to its arsenal. The company is acquiring the technology assets of Infinity, a big-data platform developed by web analytics pioneer Webtrends, and plans to add it to its Marketing Cloud suite.
Very little information about Oracle's specific plans for Infinity was released, but it will be offered as a cloud service in six to nine months following the deal's close.
It wasn't clear why Webtrends decided to sell Infinity to Oracle, as it had only launched the platform last year. In a blog post, one Webtrends executive described Infinity's purpose as such:
Infinity is built to support the data challenges presented by the Internet of Things. It does so by providing an object-centric big data store coupled with unlimited data accessibility and exploration. Being object-centric goes far beyond web analytics and “person” behaviors to collecting and understanding interactions from devices, sensors and any other networked object.
Infinity was created as a successor to Webtrends's older Log Analyzer product, and delivers deeper, more granular and lower-latency analysis, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Doug Henschen. "It can analyze customer behavior at the individual visitor and event level, and as users move from phones to laptops and other devices. Thus, it's a valuable tool in supporting multi-channel attribution."
There are some familar big data names under the hood of Infinity, including Hadoop and real-time technologies such as Kafka and Spark. Infinity should align well with Crosswise, an acquisition Oracle made last year for its Data Cloud. Crosswise aligns customer data across channels, Henschen notes.
"The Oracle Marketing Cloud role for Infinity supports cross-channel indentification in real time and in the context of marketing activities," Henschen adds.
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