All the latest marketing and ad technology for the week from SugarCRM, dotmailer, DotCMS, NetEngine, Pinterest, iTalent and Oracle Eloqua, Blab, Blismedia, Qualtrics and Interactive Intelligence.

Both consolidation and investment are apparent across this week's round-up of the latest marketing technology and ad tech news from NICE, Oracle, Blueshift, Rapidminer, Reach Analytics, Flashtalking, Buffer, Rubicon, Beehvaiour, Sqware Peg and Soceto.

Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce and Marketo are leading the pack when it comes to providing digital marketing platforms, new Gartner research reports.

Oracle is bolstering its global audience data smarts by acquiring audience tracking technology provider, AddThis.

A dynamic new tool allowing Jetstar’s mobile customers to directly interact with fare and destination information in an email is generating double-digit revenue and conversion uplift for the airline group.

It’s a story still too commonly told: Marketing staff sit in a corner, crafting brochures and sending out the latest product announcements via email when the sales team wants it. But they’re not perceived as adding strategic value.

With the benefit of hindsight, we ask a range of Australian organisations what challenges they faced implementing marketing automation, and what they’d do differently if they could stage their rollout all over again.

The average company has about 70 different types of third-party code on its website but is aware of only about a third of them. The rest are hidden in services like ad networks, widgets and analytics tools, and they can bog down performance, threaten security and compromise search-engine optimization.

Simplicity is an oft-cited goal in the world of enterprise software, but by most accounts, it's rarely achieved. Percolate is hoping to change that, at least for marketing professionals.

As rumors swirl about a potential acquisition of Salesforce.com, the biggest question has been about would-be buyers.

Fortnum and Mason have bucked the trend of enterprise vendor e-commerce platforms and opted for a lesser known, open source platform called Spree Commerce.

Oracle has rolled out several enhancements to its Marketing Cloud designed to help companies develop a more holistic view of their customers and unify their data strategy.

It's a common theme that spans functional areas within the organization: data remains stuck in silos, making it all but impossible for decision-makers to get a glimpse at the big picture. Zeroing in on marketers' experience of this problem, Oracle on Wednesday rolled out several enhancements to its Marketing Cloud designed to help companies develop a more holistic view of their customers.

UK-based supermarket Morrisons' Match & More scheme, launched late last year, lets customers collect points, which can be exchanged for vouchers in store, as well as price match Aldi, Lidl, Sainsbury's and Asda – all from their mobile phone.

Signs point to marketers opening up their wallets for emerging digital technologies, placing bets on measurable channels such as email, search and social media, shifting resources toward consumer-facing technology, and spending wads of cash on content creation and aggregation.

Half the money spent on advertising is wasted -- the question is, which half? That's the age-old question in adland. Now Oracle is hoping to help its customers answer that question with the acquisition of Datalogix, which collects offline consumer spending data in a bid to help online advertisers pick the right targets.

It’s the primary objective of every retail organisation: To recognise and personalise the shopping and brand experience of every customer, whatever the channel, whenever the interaction, and in a seamless and dynamic way. And that’s exactly what Australian fashion retailer, The PAS Group, is looking to do.

The knock against Salesforce.com has long been for its lack of robust analytics, but the company is hoping to change that perception and challenge the competition with Wave, its sixth discrete Cloud service.

Oracle has announced further integrations between key elements of its Marketing Cloud platform as it strives to unite a growing suite of applications and capabilities and win over marketers.

It seems that a week doesn't go by these days without major software vendors announcing updates to their marketing software portfolios, and the past few days were no exception as rivals Oracle and Salesforce.com both made some news.

Microsoft is poised to release a major update to its Dynamics CRM and marketing applications in a bid to gain market share against rivals such as Salesforce.com.