Oracle Acquires Collective Intellect

Just days after Oracle announced its purchase of social media marketing company Vitrue for $300 million, the software giant has acquired cloud social intelligence solutions company Collective Intellect for an undisclosed amount.

Collective Intellect focuses on turning customer conversations on social platforms like Facebook and Twitter into real-time intelligence for companies through monitoring and semantic analytics.

"Gaining intelligence from consumer conversations across social media, and knowing customers' intentions and interests helps organizations create better products and deliver better service," said Thomas Kurian, executive vice president of Oracle Development, in a statement. "Collective Intellect's leading cloud-based applications for social media monitoring, combined with Oracle's social relationship platform, offers a complete social experience to our customers."

According to Leslie Ament, vice president of research at Hypatia Research Group, Oracle's acquisition of Collective Intellect shows that "companies plan to invest in social analytics as a method of measuring if not justifying growing expenditures in social business initiatives."

Social CRM most notably took center stage yesterday when Salesforce.com officially announced its acquisition of Buddy Media for $689 million to bolster social marketing functionality. Oracle's purchase of Collective Intellect indicates "that they're building out a broader social offering for the launch of their cloud offering," notes Michael Fauscette, group vice president for software solutions at IDC, adding that the purchase will beef up outbound "sense and respond" capabilities.

Oracle says it is integrating Collective Intellect's social and text mining solution into its core SaaS solutions to help improve targeted marketing campaigns, enable customer service to respond in real-time to customer conversations on social platforms, and enable sales to generate more targeted leads and opportunities. Oracle Public Cloud, blending Fusion CRM, Fusion Human Capital Management, and social applications with platform services, is expected to be released this week.