Microsoft Joins Oracle as the Only Other Hyperscaler to Offer Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Database Services to Simplify Cloud Migration, Multicloud Deployment, and Management 

Oracle Corp and Microsoft Corp today announced Oracle Database@Azure, which gives customers direct access to Oracle database services running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and deployed in Microsoft Azure datacenters.

Oracle Database@Azure delivers all the performance, scale, and workload availability advantages of Oracle Database on OCI with the security, flexibility, and best-in-class services of Microsoft Azure, including best-in-class AI services like Azure OpenAI. This combination provides customers with more flexibility regarding where they run their workloads. It also provides a streamlined environment that simplifies cloud purchasing and management between Oracle Database and Azure services.

With the introduction of Oracle Database@Azure, Oracle and Microsoft are helping customers accelerate their migration to the cloud, so they can modernize their IT environments and take advantage of Azure's infrastructure, tooling, and services. Customers will benefit from:

• More options to move their Oracle databases to the cloud;
• The highest level of Oracle database performance, scale, and availability, as well as feature and pricing parity;
• The simplicity, security, and latency of a single operating environment (datacenter) within Azure;
• The ability to build new cloud native applications using OCI and Azure technologies, including Azure's best-in-class AI services;
• The assurance of an architecture that is tested and supported by two of the most trusted names in the cloud.

"We have a real opportunity to help organizations bring their mission-critical applications to the cloud so they can transform every part of their business with this next generation of AI," said Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, Microsoft. "Our expanded partnership with Oracle will make Microsoft Azure the only other cloud provider to run Oracle's database services and help our customers unlock a new wave of cloud-powered innovation."

"Most customers already use multiple clouds," said Larry Ellison, Oracle Chairman and CTO. "Microsoft and Oracle have been working together to make it easy for those customers to seamlessly connect Azure Services with the very latest Oracle Database technology. By collocating Oracle Exadata hardware in Azure datacenters, customers will experience the best possible database and network performance. We are proud to partner with Microsoft to deliver this best-in-class capability to customers."    

The new service delivers a fully integrated experience for deploying, managing, and using Oracle database instances within Azure. It enables organizations to drive breakthroughs in the cloud using their existing skills to leverage the best of Oracle and Microsoft capabilities directly within the Azure portal.

The new service is designed to eliminate customers' biggest challenges in adopting multicloud architectures, including disjointed management, siloed tools, and a complex purchasing process.

As a result of this expanded partnership, customers will have the choice to deploy their Azure services with their fully managed Oracle Database services all within a single datacenter, including support for Oracle Exadata Database services, Oracle Autonomous Database services, and Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC). Oracle and Microsoft have also developed a joint support model to provide rapid response and resolution for mission-critical workloads.

Additionally, Oracle and Microsoft have significantly simplified the purchasing and contracting process. Customers will be able to purchase Oracle Database@Azure through Azure Marketplace, leveraging their existing Azure agreements. They will also be able to use their existing Oracle Database license benefits including Bring Your Own License and the Oracle Support Rewards program.

"As we continue our digital transformation through innovation and technology, interoperability across cloud service providers to enable safe, secure, and rapid financial transactions for our 40 million customers is paramount," said Mihir Shah, enterprise head of data, Fidelity Investments. "Today's announcement displays how industry leaders Microsoft and Oracle are putting their customers' interests first and providing a collaborative solution that enables organizations like Fidelity to deliver best-in-class experiences for our customers and meet the substantial compliance and regulatory requirements with minimal downtime."

"Data is the lifeblood of any business, and the cloud is the best way to analyze it so that insights become actionable," said Magesh Bagavathi, senior vice president and global chief technology officer, PepsiCo. "As one of the largest food and beverage companies in the world with a market value of over 200 billion U.S. dollars, the ability to run our mission-critical systems and associated data in the cloud with Oracle Database@Azure gives us a scaled strategic advantage across our global operations."

"We are looking to our technology partners to support Vodafone's strategic focus on customers, simplicity and growth across Europe and Africa," said Scott Petty, Chief Technology Officer, Vodafone. "This new offering from Oracle and Microsoft does that by enabling us to deliver innovative and differentiated digital services faster and more cost effectively to our customers."

"As a global leader in the financial services industry, Voya has harnessed the power of digital transformation to help provide the best experience for our customers and employees. As we continue to bring our business applications to the cloud, cloud partnerships have the potential to help the entire industry maintain better security, compliance, and performance, helping to accelerate the development of new technology products, solutions, and services that enhance customer experience and help achieve better financial outcomes," said Santhosh Keshavan, executive vice president and chief information officer, Voya Financial, Inc.

Oracle will operate and manage these OCI services directly within Microsoft's datacenters globally, beginning with regions in North America and Europe.

GumGum, the contextual-first, digital advertising platform, announced today that it is the first contextual provider to achieve a System and Organization Controls Two (SOC2) compliance certification.

GumGum, the contextual-first, digital advertising platform, announced today that it is the first contextual provider to achieve a System and Organization Controls Two (SOC2) compliance certification.

As a leader in AI-driven advanced contextual insights and data, it's critical for brands to trust GumGum with the limited amount of anonymized data needed to deliver campaigns in the moments that matter. By achieving a SOC2 certification, GumGum continues to showcase its ongoing commitment to the highest security standards, increasing transparency, and ultimately making it easy for brands to know GumGum is a provider they can trust.

"Data protection is inextricably tied to consumer trust and brand perception. Companies today are looking for partners that are transparent and take data compliance as seriously as they do. In just the past year, we've seen a huge jump in the number of brands asking what our data protection policies and processes are, which we commend them for. We strongly believe in transparency and achieving our SOC2 compliance is a testament to our commitment to achieving the highest standards of security, data protection, and internal controls, and we are proud to be able to give our clients this level of confidence in our partnership," said Phil Schraeder, GumGum CEO.

SOC2 is a voluntary compliance standard for service organizations, developed by the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA), which specifies how organizations should manage customer data. The standard is based on the following Trust Services Criteria: security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy.

The SOC2 certification is a significant achievement and reinforces GumGum's commitment to data safety and integrity. GumGum went through the rigorous audit process to achieve their SOC2 compliance status and will continue to go through the certification process on a yearly basis. GumGum is currently in the process to achieve its certification for its media business as well as Playground xyz's Attention Intelligence Platform (AIP).

Based on a study of thousands of premiere RainFocus events, the Event KPI Periodic Table highlights over 150 opportunities to prove event success this season

RainFocus™, provider of the next-generation event marketing platform, today unveiled the Event KPI Periodic Table, a new industry resource for events teams to explore ways to measure event growth, customer behaviors, and overall business impact.

The comprehensive set of 154 metrics in the table spans every stage of the event lifecycle across five categories: audience acquisition, event engagement, financial performance, sponsorship performance, and program optimization. The KPIs table provides the full breadth of measurement opportunities to help organizations reach their goals.

As the partner of choice for the world's leading events teams, RainFocus has access to aggregated data to create definitive industry benchmarks and share key insights across the market. The benchmarks cover most commonly used KPIs and represent a detailed history of event performance before, during, and after the height of the pandemic. The data highlights trends in event engagement and event performance, helping organizations predict outcomes using a set of standards to assess their current state.

"The KPIs we've identified in the Event KPI Periodic Table and the list of benchmarks will take event reporting to the next level," said Brian Gates, SVP of industry strategy at RainFocus. "As we enter a busy season for events, choosing the right metrics to measure event success is critical to proving ROI to key stakeholders. Beyond that, exploring new ways to capture data and learning how to effectively use that data will propel the customer journey, impacting how marketing and sales teams move forward within the business."

The metrics table applies to in-person, virtual, and hybrid events of all sizes. It spans an organization's entire event portfolio, reducing information silos across teams and flagging event analysis gaps. RainFocus clients have already begun using these metrics and benchmarks to compare event programs and evaluate event success. Together, these tools help fuel demand, increase sales, and support customer retention.

RainFocus will host a discussion of event insights in an upcoming webinar on Wednesday, September 27, 2023 at 10:00 a.m. MDT. Led by Gates as well as RainFocus' SVP of marketing Ashleigh Cook, and senior business intelligence consultant Robert Clark, the webinar will dive into the most important benchmarks for measuring event success aligned to business growth. Register for the webinar today.

Partnership will enhance joint clients’ digital marketing transformation by gaining a competitive advantage through Optimove’s Customer-Led Marketing platform

Optimove, the first Customer-Led Marketing Platform, today announced a new strategic partnership with digital business transformation company Publicis Sapient. The partnership will enhance and elevate joint clients’ retention marketing and business results via AI-led, customer-centric, personalized customer marketing strategies at-scale.

Publicis Sapient is at the forefront of helping companies improve customer-centricity, by leading clients through a holistic digital business transformation process, changing how an organization thinks, organizes, operates, and behaves. The focus of this revitalizing business transformation is harnessing the potential of technology and data and enhancing customer experiences. 

As part of the partnership, joint clients will continually improve customer loyalty with Optimove’s all-in-one Customer-Led Marketing platform. Customer-Led Marketing, which means starting marketing with the customer instead of a product or service, has been proven to deliver brands an average increase of 33% in customer lifetime value.  
Joint clients gain vital capabilities: 

• In-depth customer insights: Access unified customer data to create as many creative customer segments as they desire without relying on other teams.   
• Smart Orchestration: Brands are freed from manually mapping every customer journey by combining AI with business rules for smart multichannel orchestration.   
• Scientific multi-touch marketing attribution: Brands can measure the incremental impact of each message along the customer journey, enabling true multi-touch marketing attribution.   
• Personalization at Scale: Brands are empowered to personalize the audience, channel, and content levels of each marketing message with seamless and scalable tools.  

"When it comes to marketing, commerce, and omnichannel strategies, Publicis Sapient consistently stands out as the preferred choice for leading brands across many industries. This partnership empowers joint clients to employ sophisticated Customer-Led Marketing strategies that start with the customer instead of a product or service,” said Erik Holt, VP of Global Ecosystem at Optimove. "We're thrilled about this partnership and the opportunity to develop solutions that facilitate client transformation and elevate marketing outcomes – ensuring clients consistently perform at the highest levels.” 

"Optimove has proven its remarkable innovation in predictive analytics and machine learning models, which we are poised to utilize in enhancing our clients' retention and loyalty strategies," said Jon Panella, Group Vice President, Commerce Practice at Publicis Sapient. "The synergies we’ve unlocked in integrating various components for comprehensive customer marketing and personalized experiences will empower our clients to rapidly scale while maintaining both agility and flexibility." 

Hightouch enables Snowflake customers to create a Composable CDP by collecting events, resolving Customer 360 profiles, and activating data into downstream tools.

Hightouch today announced that it has been recognized as a Customer Data Activation category leader in the Modern Marketing Data Stack 2023: How Data-Forward Marketers Are Redefining Strategies to Unify, Analyze, and Activate Data to Boost Revenue, executed and launched by Snowflake, the Data Cloud company.

"The Snowflake Data Cloud enables marketing professionals to operate with the full breadth of their data," said Denise Persson, Chief Marketing Officer at Snowflake. "Hightouch emerged as a leader in Customer data activation because it helps marketers compose a CDP directly on the Data Cloud, providing best in class tools to collect events, resolve identities into Customer 360s, and activate that customer data to downstream tools with Reverse ETL."

"We're honored that Snowflake has identified Hightouch as a leader in Snowflake's 2023 Modern Marketing Data Stack report," said Tejas Manohar, co-founder and co-CEO. "We're helping Snowflake users make the most of their customer data unified in the Data Cloud, putting their source-of-truth data to work in all of their marketing tools. We will continue to enable teams to compose complete marketing data stacks on Snowflake's Data Cloud—a powerful, flexible, and fully managed cloud data platform for all their data regardless of the source."

About the Report

Snowflake's data-backed report identifies the best of breed solutions used by Snowflake customers. The report shows how marketers can leverage the Snowflake Data Cloud with partner solutions, like Hightouch, to identify, serve, and convert valuable prospects into loyal customers. Snowflake analyzed usage patterns from approximately 8,1000 customers to identify ten technology categories that organizations consider when building their marketing data stacks. The extensive research reflects how customers are adopting solutions from a rapidly changing ecosystem and highlights the convergence of adtech and martech, the increased importance of privacy-enhancing technologies, and the heightened focus marketers have on measurement to maximize campaign ROI. The ten categories include:

• Analytics & Data Capture
• Enrichment
• Identity & Activation
  • Identity & Onboarders
  • Customer Data Activation
  • Advertising Platforms
• Measurement & Attribution
• Integration & Modeling
• Business Intelligence
• AI & Machine Learning
• Privacy Enhancing Technologies

Focusing on those companies that are active members of the Snowflake Partner Network (or ones with a comparable agreement in place with Snowflake), as well as Snowflake Marketplace providers, the report explores each category comprising the Modern Marketing Data Stack, highlighting technology partners and their solutions as "leaders" or "ones to watch" within each category. The report also details how current Snowflake customers leverage a number of these partner technologies to enable data-driven marketing strategies and informed business decisions. Snowflake's report provides a concrete overview of the partner solution providers and data providers marketers choose to create their data stacks.

Today, IndexBox, a recognized leader in market intelligence, announced the launch of its latest innovation: an Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot seamlessly integrated into its platform. This new feature will revolutionize the way users access and understand complex market data, providing instantaneous, user-friendly support.

The AI chatbot represents the cutting edge in machine learning and natural language processing, designed to answer questions, assist in data retrieval, and guide users through the vast reservoir of information available on the IndexBox platform. With this innovation, navigating the intricacies of global market trends, data points, and forecasts has never been easier.

As part of this launch, IndexBox is offering a free trial, allowing everyone to experience the power and convenience of this AI-driven chatbot firsthand.

Key Features & Benefits:

Instant Responses: Reduce the time spent searching for information with immediate answers to queries.
Deep Market Insight: Gain real-time insights from complex data sets, turning raw data into actionable intelligence.
User-Friendly Interface: Engage with a conversational agent that understands and caters to user-specific needs.
Continuous Learning: The AI chatbot evolves with each interaction, ensuring the user experience improves over time.

Aleksandr Romanenko, CEO of IndexBox, commented, "In the fast-paced world of market intelligence, the ability to quickly access and interpret data is crucial. Our new AI chatbot is not just a tool; it's a game-changer. It bridges the gap between raw data and insightful analysis, providing our clients with a competitive edge.”

This launch reinforces IndexBox's commitment to leveraging the latest technologies to enhance user experience and offer unparalleled value. Clients of IndexBox can access the AI chatbot feature immediately upon logging into the platform.

Platform release 18.8 empowers customer service, marketing, sales, and social teams with new AI-powered enhancements and generative AI integrations now available to all customers.

Sprinklr, the unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform for modern enterprises, today announced the company’s latest platform release (v. 18.8). With the release of 18.8, the proprietary Sprinklr AI+ platform now integrates with Google Cloud’s Vertex AI and OpenAI’s GPT models and is now generally available to all customers.

"Sprinklr is the fastest and most effective way to get AI into a global brand’s front office prebuilt for security and data privacy," said Sprinklr Founder and CEO, Ragy Thomas. “With Sprinklr AI+, our more than 1,400 enterprise customers can increase productivity, boost the quality of insights, and drive automation across their front office functions. Sprinklr’s ability to seamlessly integrate with customers’ own models, create new ones, or integrate with Sprinklr AI+ gives customers choice and access to the latest generative AI technologies.”

Sprinklr AI+ gives brands unified generative AI capabilities for customer service, insights, social media management, and marketing built with enterprise-level governance, security, and data privacy. With Sprinklr AI+, customers can utilize Generative AI with just a few clicks, without the need to learn new workflows, and with confidence in the accuracy, security, and privacy of the Sprinklr platform.

Release 18.8 introduces more than 700 new features and enhancements across the four Sprinklr product suites: Sprinklr Service, Sprinklr Insights, Sprinklr Marketing, and Sprinklr Social. An overview of key updates and enhancements is below.

• Sprinklr Service: Create smarter contact centers with Sprinklr AI+ generative AI capabilities.
  • Generative AI-powered insights hub: Eliminate manual analysis of reports with AI-powered dashboards that automatically identify insights and recommend actions.
  • Quality management enhancements powered by generative AI: Auto-create and configure parameters for quality scoring without external support.
  • Generative AI for conversational analytics 2.0: Generative AI model trained to highlight contact drivers and detect any unidentified issues. The platform can also detect patterns in customer and agent speech potentially indicative of an issue.
  • Conversational AI+ powered by generative AI: Customers can now harness the power of LLM and generative AI to eliminate rigid decision trees and enhance virtual assistants. Users can create dynamic dialog flows and craft context-specific, natural conversations with ease.
  • Video commerce on live chat: Empower customer service agents to curate a personalized shopping experience during video calls by adding relevant products to the customer's cart in real-time. Advanced capabilities such as product search, voucher suggestions and cart creation are available to agents within the platform.
  • Robust workforce management (WFM) solution (in Beta): Alongside the core WFM capabilities, empower supervisors with live updates on agent adherence and construct optimal schedules considering agent preferences with shift bidding.

• Sprinklr Insights: Leverage improved actionability, upgraded channel coverage and workflow improvements.
  • AI-powered insights assistant: Sprinklr insights assistant provides information on root cause and actionable recommendations.
  • Generative AI-powered automatic summarization: Automatic AI-powered summary of all conversations associated with an aggregate data point quickly highlights key information, recommended actions, and reduces the need to review and read every comment or piece of content.
  • Capture conversations and content from China across apps like Sina Weibo, Xiaohongshu and Kuaishou: Release 18.8 includes expanded source coverage to enable customers to capture conversations and user-generated content (UCG) from major Chinese social apps.

• Sprinklr Marketing: Ensure that your campaigns engage audiences better than before.
  • Effortless Ad Content Creation: Generate engaging ad content quickly and efficiently at scale. Utilize Sprinklr's AI+ integrations with leading generative AI offerings to effortlessly create compelling ad copies and carousel stories.
  • Dynamic Content Adaptation: Seamlessly modify existing content to meet your needs, whether it's extending, condensing, or rephrasing. Customize and improve your content with tailored prompts, allowing adjustments to tone and length. Translate any text instantly, by simply choosing the desired language.
  • Streamlined UTM Tracking: Simplify UTM tracking for non-social content. Create customized UTM forms, effortlessly generate UTM links, and efficiently manage all UTMs for non-social content, all within the Sprinklr platform.
  • Optimized Google Discovery Ads: Take control of the end-to-end management of your Google Discovery Ads. Publish, edit, configure, optimize, and monitor Google Discovery Ads seamlessly within Sprinklr, offering an engaging native ad experience within your audience's feed.

• Sprinklr Social: Drive better social media engagement and improve governance.
  • Industry-leading governance: Release 18.8 includes several enhancements to build on Sprinklr’s industry-leading governance with new channel integrations, privacy settings, and admin configurations.
  • New Slack integration: Social teams can now manage slack messages within Sprinklr alongside other platforms.
  • Automated video optimization: User can leverage automated video optimization for different channels to help eliminate manual effort when preparing and publishing video content.

Studio allows non-technical users to harness the power of AI to create engaging customer experiences at scale while improving internal efficiency and reducing time-to-market

Cloudinary, the image and video platform that powers many of the world’s top brands, today announced a key enhancement to its enterprise DAM, Cloudinary Assets, with the addition of Studio, a powerful new feature that allows users to quickly adapt images and video with ease and at scale. Powered by AI, Studio users will benefit from more efficient media management workflows, improved collaboration, and faster time to market. With access to built-in generative AI capabilities, users can quickly remove backgrounds, add drop shadows or otherwise manipulate images and videos to suit their needs. Cloudinary is launching Studio at the Henry Stewart DAM conference this week in New York City.

Cloudinary’s enterprise DAM uses intelligent automation to supercharge the creation of image and video variations, and eliminate critical but tedious and time-consuming work. Cloudinary Assets users save countless hours with the ability to define one or multiple transformations that the platform can use to instantly optimize images and videos for all channels, devices, and platforms and automatically generate variations when uploaded or on demand.

“AI has been at the heart of our image and video solutions for more than a decade – and this legacy of innovation powers our intelligent, modern DAM platform, enabling us to help many of the world’s most successful brands deliver great customer experiences while improving internal efficiency and profitability,” said Rob Daynes, managing director for DAM at Cloudinary. “We’re thrilled to introduce Studio’s cutting-edge automation and generative AI capabilities to help teams adapt their assets at scale with ease so they can bring campaigns to life faster and continue delivering the experiences their customers love.”

Studio brings additional workflow efficiencies to a modern DAM platform that includes:

• Automation of collaboration workflows: Cloudinary makes it easy to create and share image and video collections between internal teams and external collaborators, facilitate review and approval workflows, and navigate asset handoffs.
• Unlimited asset variations: From a single source file, users can rely on AI to automatically create an unlimited number of experience-ready assets that are optimized for performance and tailored to the specifications of each channel.
• Access to best-in-class apps: Customizations don’t need to be complex, expensive, or process-heavy. Apps for DAM are API-based and future-proof, providing a low-cost approach to ensuring that customers can maximize the solution’s value.
• Flawless asset delivery: Cloudinary’s AI-powered automation ensures content looks great, performs as designed, and loads lightning fast on every screen.
• Battle-tested stability: Cloudinary’s emphasis on security, high availability, and superior performance means brands can rely on the platform to always be there for them.

These powerful capabilities deliver impressive benefits for many of the world’s most dynamic brands. For example, the world’s largest collector car auction company, Mecum Auctions, relies on Cloudinary to automatically retrieve and optimize more than two million assets published across mobile, tablet, and desktop – automations that have saved the auction house more than 2,000 working hours, equal to a full year of work for one employee.

According to Mecum Auctions’ IT Director Cade Cannon: “We're a big company in terms of our footprint, but we don't have armies of resources. Being smart and being agile with our resources is to our advantage, and knowing that we are now able to align our resources with things that are adding value to the company or adding value to our customers – that's our sweet spot, and Cloudinary allows us to do that.”