Oracle announces updates to Oracle Unity

Oracle today announced enhancements to Oracle Unity, the CDP which manages data across its marketing, sales and service offerings. A number of the updates are aimed at improving the CDP’s ability to support B2B marketing.

The CDP race. This marks the latest advance in the CDP race among the major players in the CX space, with Adobe’s Real-Time CDP in place, and Salesforce announcing last week that Customer 360 Audiences will be generally available in October.

Nate Skinner, SVP and Global Marketing Lead for Oracle CX joined Oracle this year after three years as a senior marketer with Salesforce Pardot. We asked him to take us through the new developments.

Compliance. “The first thing is enhancing security and privacy,” he said. In this environment, digital transformation is real — accelerated by years for companies. All of them want to make sure they’re compliant, but some don’t really know what the means. What we announced in this release was integration with Sourcepoint, which is a consent management platform, and OneTrust, a leading security and privacy platform.”

Ad activation. Oracle is also announcing ad activation for unknown customers. With hundreds of thousands of unknown visitors passing through the Oracle eco-system daily, Unity will execute real-time behavioral analysis, and use machine learning to improve their experience. “Unknown personalization is a big feature of this release,” said Skinner. “It’s across all channels: websites, apps, POS.”

Ads are also activated for known visitors through an integration with Oracle’s DMP.

Benefits for B2B. “In this release,” said Skinner, “we announced B2B capabilities that include data schema, support for accounts and contacts, and a deep integration with Eloqua.” Unity already had B2B capabilities: “What this integration does is bring those capabilities into Eloqua. The B2B schema about a person, beyond just their email and their name, is where we’re enhancing the integration with Eloqua to be able to do account-based marketing.

Partnership with Sprinklr. Connecting all the dots along the non-linear path of today’s customer journey requires taking account of social activity. Oracle is announcing new integrations between CX and social media management platform Sprinklr and both Oracle Eloqua and Oracle Service Cloud.

Why we care. With CX suites stitched together from natively-built offerings and acquisitions, the major vendors are finally unifying data across those suites in an actionable way.

About The Author

Kim Davis

Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech Today. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Prior to working in tech journalism, Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.