Oracle Debuts Data as a Service for Customer Intelligence

Oracle this week announced two Data as a Service (DaaS) updates, further adding to its Data Cloud.

"We're trying to help companies really understand what their [customers] are doing, what they are saying, and what they are actually buying," Pieter De Temmerman, a vice president of Oracle Data Cloud, says. "And in order to do that, you really have to have an understanding of data and what's being conveyed in the data from a lot of different sources."

With the introduction of DaaS for Customer Intelligence, the company aims to help organizations make more accurate conclusions based on unstructured customer feedback. Advancements to DaaS for Marketing will grant B2B marketers access to detailed information from top decision makers in the B2B space.

DaaS for Customer Intelligence is designed to give companies access to the insights from data that is scattered across the Web in such places as chat rooms, forums, surveys, and comment sections. It is powered by Oracle's Semantic API, which relies on keyword/Boolean search, natural language processing, and latent semantic analysis to read the various data from millions of social sites. The system can aggregate data in one place to determine common sentiments about products, as well as what the main issues and trends are, and ultimately use that information to see how customer opinions are impacting sales. Businesses can also use the information to make better decisions about their products. "This really takes social and unstructured insights to a level that wasn't previously available" says Tara Roberts, a vice president of Oracle Data Cloud. "Organizations can [now] bring insights into any system, and can combine it with other unstructured data, as well as the structured data they already have," she says.

Leveraging recent partnerships with Madison Logic and Dun & Bradsreet, Oracle's expansions to DaaS for Marketing aim to help B2B providers better identify new prospects through comprehensive data sets. Users will now have access to 300 million business profiles that will be available through the Marketing Cloud. The data sets are configurable by 200 specifications based on a company's industry, age, size, and other relevant information about employees and the amount of sales. Salespeople can also mine the information to compile or update prospect lists.

Though the product is designed primarily with B2B marketers in mind, it has proven to be of practical use for consumer-facing marketers dealing with high-end, expensive products as well, Temmerman says. "A number of B2C marketers are starting to use this B2B data to target consumers who have a certain seniority level at larger companies, because what that's typically indicative of is having disposable income," he says.

While Oracle would not comment in detail at this time, it plans to "close the loop" on the cloud capabilities outlined above by drawing on the strengths of Datalogix. The company, which Oracle bought late last year, specializes in analysis of consumer purchasing. "Datalogix really allows us to understand what people are buying, so that gives you that full picture of the consumer, which we're very excited about," De Temmerman says.