Oracle Continues March To Cloud Buying Data As A Service Broker Datalogix

Oracle added another piece to its growing cloud portfolio today, buying digital-marketing, Data as a Service broker Datalogix. The move not only gives Oracle another cloud tool, it’s one that’s aimed directly at marketers, an area where Oracle is fighting hard with rival Salesforce.com and others for dominance.

The announcement did not include terms.

Datalogix gives Oracle a data-driven service, designed to help companies link consumer spending with online ad campaigns, a powerful combination because it can help digital marketers understand if their online ad campaigns are actually translating into offline buying.

Oracle surprised some people in its latest earnings report when it showed significant growth in its cloud computing business, announcing “cloud software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) revenue was up 45% to $516 million.”

Oracle could be coming to the realization that the future of its business is in the cloud. Consider that total revenue was up just 3 percent and hardware revenue was up just one percent. Up is better than down, of course, but the biggest growth area is clearly in the cloud.

And the cloud isn’t the only trend at play here. Oracle recognizes that data-driven marketing tools are going to be part of a big potential business opportunity moving forward, and Datalogix gives them an easy in into that market simply by writing a check.

R Ray Wang, principle at Constellation Research says this is a bigger deal than most people realize. “The convergence of adtech and digital marketing is about taking big data insights and enabling the campaign to commerce lifecycle. The bottom line – Oracle is serious about investing in the campaign to commerce lifecycle,” Wang said.

Datalogix has 650 customers including 82 of the top 100 advertisers and 7 of 8 of the top digital media publishers. This is clearly a nice haul for Oracle, especially when you consider those customers include the likes of Ford and Kraft along with Facebook and Twitter.

While Oracle will more than likely welcome these big customers and leave Datalogix alone, there has to be some customer anxiety that the bigger company could mess with a key tool after acquiring it. It doesn’t necessarily make sense that Oracle would do that, but it wouldn’t be the first time a big company swallowed a good smaller one and let it rot or fundamentally changed it when it incorporated the acquisition into the larger organization. This could be particularly problematic for Facebook, which uses Datalogix as a key tool to power it’s offline consumer spending measurement, and then matches that to ad spend to prove ROI.

The company was founded in 2002 and has pulled in $86.5M in funding to-date. Its last significant round of funding was May of this year when it received $40M in Series C money from Institutional Venture Partners and Wellington Management. Crunchbase reports Datalogix also received an undisclosed amount of secondary funding in August.

Datalogix headquarters are in Westminster, Colorado.