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.

Add Tibco to the list of vendors pushing a full stack of so-called "customer engagement" software, which companies use to track and analyze consumer behavior in hopes of building deeper relationships with them and ultimately, selling more products and services.

Tibco's board of directors has begun a review of "strategic and financial alternatives," which presumably include a sale, the middleware vendor has confirmed following a news report of its plans.

Almost all marketers are looking to implement marketing automation or data management in the next 12 months as they come to terms with the increasingly complex marketing landscape, a new report claims.

Modern marketers are spending half their time managing the complex technology ecosystem supporting digital marketing instead of doing the things they should be doing to personalise customer experiences.

Oracle has hooked up its SRM (social relationship management) software suite to LinkedIn, a move to give marketing and customer support staffers a way to reach the business-oriented social network's 300 million users.

SAP is scooping up SeeWhy, maker of real-time targeted marketing software, in a bid to flesh out the omni-channel commerce platform it gained through last year's acquisition of Hybris.

Oracle is moving into the market for big customer data by buying BlueKai, which aggregates data on consumers and offers it to marketers via a platform for running targeted marketing campaigns on the Web, offline and on mobile devices. Terms of the deal, which was announced Monday, were not disclosed.

After spending billions to acquire a series of marketing-related software companies, Oracle is now undergoing the process of creating a unified suite it can take to battle against competing offerings from the likes of Salesforce.com and Microsoft.

The UK's Arcadia Group, which owns popular brands such as Topshop, Topman and Dorothy Perkins, has signed a £50 million deal with Oracle to boost its investment in digital technologies and platforms.

Customer experience has emerged as one of the enterprise software industry's hotter segments of late, as companies try to run marketing, sales and support across both traditional and digital channels.

Oracle’s US$1.5 billion acquisition of Responsys is indicative of the rapidly changing marketing software landscape and the jostling between leading global IT vendors to win over CMOs, industry pundits claim.

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.

Oracle is set to acquire business-to-consumer marketing software vendor Responsys for US$1.5 billion in a bid to flesh out its own capabilities as well as strike back at rivals such as Salesforce.com and Microsoft.

Oracle is rolling out a series of new features for its Eloqua marketing automation suite, hoping to get a leg up on rivals such as Salesforce.com and IBM in the red-hot software segment.