Social Media Marketer Vitrue Has Been Bought By Oracle For $300 Million
Breaking news: TechCrunch has discovered that software giant Oracle has made a big investment in social media today. The company has bought Vitrue, the social media marketing company that is a close partner to Facebook.
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook’s completed IPO in May 2012 had put the commercial importance of its platform under intense industry scrutiny. Vitrue matters in that setting because it is a confirmed close Facebook partner, giving Oracle an immediate position in social-media marketing rather than merely an adjacent software category.
The deal’s broad pickup across business and technology outlets underscores that a large enterprise-software vendor entering social marketing was being treated as a consequential strategic move.
First-order effects
- Oracle takes ownership of Vitrue for $300 million, adding a social-media marketing business and its Facebook partnership to Oracle’s portfolio.
- Vitrue’s customers and Facebook-facing operations move under Oracle’s control, making Oracle the vendor responsible for the company’s social-marketing offering.
Second-order effects
- Oracle gains a direct claim on marketers’ spending around Facebook, increasing pressure on enterprise software vendors to show how their products address social channels.
- Facebook’s marketing partners become more strategically important as large software vendors seek established routes into the platform’s advertiser ecosystem.
Third-order effects
- The acquisition points toward social-media marketing becoming a component of enterprise marketing software, rather than a stand-alone specialist service.
- If large vendors continue to buy social-marketing partners, value in the sector will increasingly accrue to firms that combine platform relationships with enterprise sales and software distribution.
The trend: Enterprise software vendors are moving to own the tools and platform relationships that connect brands’ marketing operations to social networks.