Oracle Beefs Up Social Networking With Involver Deal

Oracle continues to open its cheque book with the news that it has purchased its third social networking-related software startup in two months – with the acquisition of cloud-based marketing-service provider Involver.

Terms of the transaction were not released.

Previous Deals

On 5 June, Oracle bought Collective Intellect, which markets a cloud-based application that helps companies understand and respond to customers’ conversations on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

On 23 May, the Redwood City-based IT giant acquired Vitrue, a cloud-based social media marketing campaign creator that enables customers to create, manage and measure social media marketing campaigns on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, You Tube and Google+.

“The combination of Involver with Oracle is expected to create the most advanced and comprehensive cloud-based social solution, across marketing, sales and service touch points,” Involver President and CEO Don Beck said in a blog post.

“Our technology is expected to extend Oracle’s social platform to help customers more easily and cost effectively collaborate and build engaging applications and social experiences across social networks and the Open Graph.”

Oracle, which launched the Oracle Cloud only last month, is putting a large investment into building a menu of social-networking services from which subscribers can choose. The company purchased RightNow Technologies in October 2011 for $1.5 billion (£965m), then annexed career-management software service Taleo for $1.9 billion (£1.2bn) in February 2012.

Social Drive

Oracle competitors Salesforce.com and SAP also have been scooping up social-networking startups in the last few months.

The transaction is expected to close in September, Beck said.

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