Saturday, June 24, 2017

Will the Big Players in Cloud Buyrite a Second Time Around?


This article examines the ability of larger players in cloud like Microsoft, Oracle and Adobe to fully understand how to harness social media tools as they begin to acquire these smaller companies with the goal of making a foray into social media marketing.
The large cloud computing providers/players have begun to redevelop an appetite for an integrated digital marketing platform that incorporates social media tools into their core. Given the previous record (failures) of these companies in the early 2000’s with their first round of acquisitions of social media companies and the lack of understanding of what these platforms could do, there is a cautious optimism that this second attempt is less disastrous. The hope is that the combination of factors -  a more mature industry, time to better understand how these tools work, an understanding of the importance of these tools to the customer acquisition and advocacy lifecycle and the quantifiable impact of an integrated social media utility for businesses – helps these big players to integrate and utilize their acquisitions more strategically this time around.
While there is an ongoing, buzz about consolidation and acquisitions in the industry at the moment, the direction of these targeted acquisitions is yet to be determined, but everyone hopes that the social media tools that eventually get snapped-up and integrated into existing or new platforms by these players will enable all constituents to derive the advantages of social media for their marketing clouds.

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