Oracle wasted little time making its first acquisition of the new year, announcing it will purchase AddThis, maker of website tools for audience engagement, tracking and content recommendation. AddThis's platform is used by more than 15 million websites, as Oracle notes in its announcement:
Oracle Data Cloud ingests third-party data, extracts value, and activates the data to drive insights and harness this knowledge for targeting, personalization and measurement. With the addition of AddThis, Oracle Data Cloud’s offering is expected to deliver unprecedented levels of audience insight, measurement and reach.
The AddThis team brings significant knowledge and capabilities to Oracle and will further extend the value Oracle Data Cloud brings to market.
AddThis has ongoing access to information on nearly 2 billion unique website visitors, as well as 800 million mobile devices each month. On balance, AddThis reaches 96 percent of the U.S. web audience, according to its website.
The platform, Audience Intelligence, is built with open-source software. Its components include Hydra, a distributed data processing and storage framework, and Stream Library, which summarizes data streams.
The AddThis deal has yet to close, and to that end, Oracle declined to provide additional comment. AddThis will be folded into Oracle's Data Cloud portfolio, which it previously built out through the 2014 acquisitions of consumer data mart vendors BlueKai and DataLogix. BlueKai provides tools that marketers can use to tap into more than 200 third-party data marts, while DataLogix aggregates information on greater than $2 trillion in consumer spending.
Analysis: AddThis Helps Feed the Marketing Data Beast
"In a world where knowing your audience is key to engaging, growing, educating, inspiring and converting visitors into customers, it requires data," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Natalie Petouhoff. "With the consumerization of IT, marketers have come to expect that the applications they use to get their job done to be easier and more intuitive, like the apps they use in their personal life. What Addthis does is give a marketer simpler, more agile, website tools to know and target their audiences better, with better content and allow those audiences to engage and follow brands they feel an affinity with. It is a smart move for Oracle to strengthen their data as a service offering."
Terms of the AddThis acquisition weren't disclosed, but Oracle has apparently been willing to pay handsomely to build out its Data Cloud, reportedly spending $1.2 billion on DataLogix and about $400 million for BlueKai. Those deals followed Oracle's $871 million purchase of B2B marketing vendor Eloqua and the $1.5 billion acquisition of Responsys, which focuses on B2C marketing. Altogether, the products provide a formidable array of marketing capabilities that customers should expect Oracle to push with vigor over the coming year.
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