The run of social media acquisitions continues apace, with the latest activity coming from Oracle and its proposed purchase of Involver for an undisclosed sum. This acquisition is the third in the social space over the last couple of months for Oracle, following Vitrue (see here) and Collective Intellect (see here).
Oracle, like Microsoft and Salesforce.com, has developed a voracious appetite for social media acquisitions. As the other major enterprise software player, SAP needs to stimulate and satisfy its taste buds before the best dishes disappear. Jive Software has always been a likely choice although its share price is rising due to greater social awareness and the level of acquisition activity in the sector.
As for Involver (founded in 2007), it brings social media development tools to the Oracle portfolio (including SDL - its social markup language), enabling marketing applications such as customised campaigns, to be rapidly developed and run on social media networks like Facebook. Oracle is in buying mode at the moment so more social acquisitions are a virtual certainty. Soon it will have to start explaining how it plans to bring these assets together and lay out a social strategy and its alignment with the rest of its vast application portfolio. One of the most interesting aspects of that will be its plans for making money from the social sector, something that has eluded vendors to date in this albeit emerging area.
