Industry analysts know that major M&A deals, product announcement, and organizational changes can come at any time. But it still surprises us a little when a major player like Oracle announces a significant acquisition just days before Christmas. At any rate, Santa has come early for both Mr. Ellison and the Datalogix team this year.

We've just published a Quick Take on our perceptions of the deal, which holds a lot of promise. Our biggest concern? Realizing that promise requires some serious integration work, and so far, Oracle hasn't proven that it's especially capable of integrating the stack it's acquired for the Marketing Cloud offering. We also worry that Oracle's Data Cloud — where Datalogix will sit — is heading directly for a major privacy warzone. Whether Oracle is ready for that battle remains to be seen.

But the bigger picture is this: the Datalogix and Bluekai acquisitions, along with many others of the past year — including Conversant by Epsilon, LiveRamp by Acxiom, and Adometry by Google — are evidence of a fast-consolidating marketing and advertising technology landscape. 2015 will doubtless bring more M&A activity in this space, with a likely run on smaller technology and data vendors that have mostly been flying under the radar. What this race for the ultimate "marketing cloud" will mean to CI pros remains to be seen, but you should certainly anticipate plenty of shakeups in your vendor relationships over the next 18 months. 

Please take a look at the report (subscription required), and weigh in with your thoughts. If you're a Datalogix or Bluekai client, especially, we'd love to hear your take!

The entire Customer Insights team wishes you a wonderful holiday season, and a terrific start to 2015!