The future of Oracle’s MarTech portfolio seems clouded in doubt

Oracle's testing and personalization offering is getting rather long in the tooth

Wall Street darling Klaviyo has IPO'd but there's bigger things afoot in the Outbound Marketing Platform world

Several CDPs are now beginning to offer some capabilities in this area.

RSG receives many subscriber inquiries about what to expect from these major players, so here's a short summary

Myths are important because they allow us to share common stories. They often have a foundation in the truth, but in a commercial context, they can become disconnected from reality

I don't know any enterprise customer that wants — or believes it remotely possible — to obtain all those services from a single vendor. No, this is a vendor fantasy, getting peddled by analyst shills.

You won't find a single, dominant player. In fact, some of the larger vendors have proven slower to adopt software "consumerization" practices.

As you might expect the list shows a great diversity in systems deployed, but also suggests some aging platforms. What to make of it?

Customer Relationship Management is increasingly the backbone of MarTech and digital customer engagement. After many requests from RSG subscribers to apply our rigorous evaluation methodology to this marketplace, we decided to add a new vendor evaluation stream

This technology certainly has potential for several scenarios. But these are early days and it will be a while before it becomes mainstream.

Suffice it to say that with Oracle, like its competitors, these toolsets remain standalone offerings rather than an integrated whole. So a savvy customer will still cherry-pick the right solutions rather than going with a single vendor.

We just released an advisory paper "Contrasting the Major Marketing Clouds" for RSG research subscribers. This brief is an excellent way for marketing / technology executives to quickly gain a comparative understanding of the leading marketing clouds.

This frequently comes up in sales situations, where a colleague may be onsite at a customer location presenting your company’s solution. The slide below shows some of the requirements for salespeople, but could be generalized for all types of mobile employees

As with most other terms in technology marketplaces, there are many variations and meanings of decoupling. Let's look at two general variants: