The battle for dominance in customer relationship management (CRM) is heating up as Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) revealed the acquisition of software as a service (SaaS) provider Parature.
Microsoft to target enterprises with better CRM offerings
Raymond James analyst Terry Tillman sees the CRM market as being “dynamic” because of these two acquisitions, which echo past moves by some of the top CRM vendors, like salesforce.com, inc. (NYSE:CRM), which bought Instranet. That acquisition helped bolster Salesforce’s Service Cloud business, which is now one of the biggest drivers of growth at the company. Also in 2012, Oracle acquired SaaS provider RightNow Technologies.
Tillman thinks the CRM market is going to heat up even more and probably surprise to the upside compared with forecasts for industry growth. He sees large enterprises beginning to replace the traditional CRM solutions with services like what Microsoft and Oracle offer. He also believes integration of traditional CRM workflows, sales force automation, customer service and digital marketing solutions will become increasingly tighter. This, in turn, should provide opportunities for companies like Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ:ORCL), both of which have solid footholds in the enterprise sector.
Oracle acquires Corente
In addition to Microsoft’s acquisition of Parature, Oracle also made a recent acquisition. The company bought software-defined networking (SDN) technology provider Corente, which offers solutions for wide area networks (WANs). Corente offers a platform which actually speeds up the deployment of services and applications which are cloud-based. That platform also enables customers to both manage and provision their global private networks connecting to any of their sites in an easy and secure way.
Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ:ORCL) has been making a move into the networking industry more and more with acquisition after acquisition, according to Raymond James analyst Michael Turits. In addition to this latest purchase of Corente, the company also bought at least three other networking companies over the last two years: Xsigo, Tekelec and Acme Packet.
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