Report: Oracle Paid $1.2 Billion for Datalogix to Beat Salesforce 

Oracle, founded by Larry Ellison, is believed to have paid $1.2 billion to acquire Datalogix in December as part of an effort to strengthen its new Adtech business and stay ahead of its rival Salesforce, with CEO Marc Beniof, a report said.

There were rumors of a bidding war for the company, considered one of the jewels of the marketing world, with Datalogix reportedly seeking $1 billion, Business Insider Australia said.

By analyzing purchasing patterns and matching them to campaigns, Datalogix has helped prove that online ad campaigns really make people walk into stores and buy things. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg raved about the company, and in early 2014 Google signed a deal with it.

The acquisition of Datalogix was considered odd because Oracle had already bought one of Datalogix’s big competitors, BlueKai, almost a year ago, and at a much more reasonable price. Sources told Business Insider that Oracle paid $350 million to $400 million for BlueKai.

Oracle had two good reasons. First, Oracle had asked former BlueKai CEO Omar Tawakol to start a new adtech business for Oracle, known as the Oracle Data Cloud. Tawakol pushed for the purchase of Datalogix in order to integrate it into the business, the report said.

The second reason was Oracle’s latest rival, Salesforce, had also just signed a partnership deal with Datalogix for its Marketing Cloud. Beating Salesforce in this area is very important to Oracle as both companies are leaders in one of the biggest trends in enterprise tech: big IT budgets held by the chief marketing officer (CMO) rather than the CIO.

CMOs are predicted to spend $US32 billion on tech by 2018 and a total of $130 million between 2014 and 2018, much of it on cloud services for recurring contracts, Business Insider said.

Datalogix had estimated 2014 revenues of $125 million but wasn’t profitable, and as of June it had 400 employees.