Oracle thinks global with its social media analysis software

Oracle has broadened the number of languages its social media analysis software supports, in a bid to appeal to enterprises with operations and customers across the world.

The vendor's Social Relationship Management software now has support for English, Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Korean and Japanese, according to Monday's announcement.

SRM is part of the company's broader suite of "customer experience" software that spans sales automation, customer service, marketing and support. It competes in this area not only with frequent rival SAP but also Adobe and IBM, companies that have largely eschewed the enterprise applications market but see an opportunity in technologies that cater to digital business.

Oracle's SRM software includes semantic text analysis capabilities that "go well beyond keyword and Boolean to reveal actionable insights like consumer intent, product likes/dislikes, and customer service issues," according to Monday's announcement.

Other new features include a dashboard that gives users the ability "to see where conversations are happening globally, and allocate workload accordingly," Oracle said.

There are two main categories of social media monitoring tools, said analyst Alan Lepofsky, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research: "Those that can help an individual brand monitor and respond to content related to them, and then tools that can analyze larger sets of data, such as shopping patterns on holidays."

One of the most important functions is accurately matching a person posting on social media to actual customer records that show their buying or support history, Lepofksy added.

Oracle's acquisitions of RightNow, Vitrue, Collective Intellect, Evolver, Eloqua and Responsys are an attempt to give it a portfolio that can help companies connect with customers through the entire buying cycle, Lepofsky said.

Many companies could now be ready to invest in social media analysis tools.

"I think most organizations are past the 'thinking about social media' stage in terms of sales, marketing and support," Lepofsky said. "Social media as a channel is influencing many organizations to combine their digital strategy across multiple departments that used to operate more independently."

Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Chris' email address is Chris_Kanaracus@idg.com