Deconstructing Oracle's Social Relationship Management Suite

 

In 2012 Oracle acquired four companies relevant to our Digital Marketing Technology evaluations – Eloqua, Vitrue, Involver, and Collective Intellect. Of these, the last three form the basis of Oracle’s rebranded "Social Relationship Management" (SRM) Suite.

THe SRM Platform itself comes in two flavors. You can license Social Marketing (SM), which consists of products from Vitrue, or you can license Social Engagement & Monitoring (SEM), which consists of products from Involver and Collective Intellect. You can of course license both SM and SEM, which is what Oracle will push you for. 

So then depending on what you’ve licensed, you will see the following modules when you log in:

  • Listen and Analyze: For monitoring social media, individuals, and how they are interacting with your pages as well as on other sites. This module consists of multiple components from all three products: Vitrue, Involver and Collective Intellect. So if you want to have all the functionality, you will need to license both SM and SEM
  • Engage: This is for engaging with users – replying to their comments or assigning them to your colleagues for follow up. Comes from Involver and requires SEM
  • Publish: Comes from Vitrue. Required for creating content for your social media pages. Requires SM
  • Workflow and Automation: This is really the management and admin interface. It consists of components from all the products and so requires you to license SEM and SM if you need all those components
  • Content and Apps: Required for creating Facebook pages and apps. This comes from Vitrue and requires SM license

As you can see, there are multiple modules and each module consists of components from various tools that Oracle acquired. Now Oracle has announced it has integrated them but for you the buyer, I'd recommend that you do your own testing. 

Note that Oracle has taken similar approaches in the past. At some point in time, Oracle had multiple Portal offerings all packaged as part of their WebCenter offering, and it was not uncommon to see multiple Portal servers running side-by-side in a single implementation. It has taken a long time for them  to improve that situation and so I hope this time they do better. 

We will of course review SRM in much more detail in our forth coming update to the Digital Marketing Technology report and continue to share what we learn with you.

 


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