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May 31, 2012

Buzzient, Enterprise

Integration, Facebook,

Oracle, Salesforce.com,

Social CRM, social

enterprise applications,

Social Media Analytics,

Social Media Marketing

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Thoughts on Vitrue and BuddyMedia

Man, how things can change quickly. After four years of predicting that

enterprise application giants would enter the social sphere through M&A, it

looks like it’s happening. Oracle bought Vitrue last week for $300M and now Salesforce.com is buying

Buddy Media for $800M. My phone has been ringing for days with people asking me to predict “Who’s

next?”. I just might start a blog called “Social Nostradamus” on the side. ;o)

In looking at these two acquisitions though, it’s important to realize how early we really are in the social

revolution. First of all, I want to acknowledge and congratulate both Reggie Bradford and Mike Lazerow;

both are first rate gentlemen and great entrepreneurs who I’ve had the opportunity to meet several times.

They’ve built great companies and great cultures, and deserve all the fruits of their labors.

I should state that both of these deals are very synergistic with Buzzient and our strategy. In both cases,

the Buzzient Enterprise applications are complementary; Vitrue and Buddy Media both manage the

outbound social media marketing and monitoring function, whereas Buzzient handles the inbound social

analytics and social CRM integration roles. So, both companies were potential partners for us.

By “early in the the social revolution”, I’d like to point to a previous blog post:

http://www.buzzient.com/blog/the-three-phases-of-enterprise-social-media/

Both of these acquisitions address the first 1-2 phases of the enterprise social media challenge. Now, both

Oracle and Salesforce will have robust capabilities to create outbound campaigns targeted at social media

users on Facebook(largely) and some other social platforms.

What’s STILL missing from the puzzle, however, is the ability to tie the analytics and data back to existing

customer applications. That is, “How do you get all this new social data into the existing Siebel, Salesforce,

and other applications that are already in place?”. That’s where Buzzient comes in, and offers a

complementary social media integration capability that neither Vitrue nor Buddy Media developed. Also,

given the heterogeneous nature of complex Fortune 5000 technology infrastructures, there will always be a

need for a capability to monitor, analyze, and integrate social media that is not vendor-specific.

So, where does this all go? I predict the following:

- Continued M&A by enterprise software companies to tightly couple a social monitoring capability to their

app stacks. Social media monitoring is basic table stakes now, like browser accessibility was in 1996.

- Emergence of a handful of social media integration independents, who take monitoring to the next level

and enable full social CRM integration. (Buzzient is already one of them)

- Extension of social CRM to other app categories (ERP, HCM). (Buzzient has already done this with Infor

Workspace, for example)

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- Establishment of a common integration framework based on API’s from several vendors (Yep, we’ve got

an API, too)

These are just a few of our picks. Let us know if you have other predictions.

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