Enterprise

Why Oracle just bought a marketing company called Maxymiser

Read in app
thomas kurian, oracle, sv100 2015
Oracle President of Product Development Thomas Kurian  Flickr/Oracle PR

Oracle on Thursday announced that it was buying New York marketing-tech company Maxymiser for an undisclosed sum.

Maxymiser was founded in 2006 and had raised about $15 million in venture funding through 2012 and then a round of undisclosed private equity investment in 2013, according to Crunchbase. Later that same year, two of the three founders left to launch other startups.

The third founder, Mark Simpson, who is president, is moving to Oracle with the deal, according this video he put out with Oracle about it. CEO Tim Brown is also joining Oracle, according to the press release, as are an estimated 400 employees. Maxymiser is headquartered in New York with multiple US offices and offices in Edinburgh, London, Germany and the Ukraine.

Maxymiser is famous for a/b testing, where marketeers can try different options for their marketing campaigns to see which ones work best. It names HSBC, EPSON, Virgin Media, Alaska Airlines, Harry & David, Progressive and Office Depot as customers.

The product will be integrated into Oracle's Marketing Cloud in a deal signed off by Oracle's rising star head of engineering, Thomas Kurian.

Oracle wanted Maxymiser because of a big trend going on at big companies. Chief Marketing Officers now command huge budgets for tech and software. By 2017, CMOs are expected to outspend CTOs on tech, so software companies like Oracle, Salesforce, Adobe are going after this market with a vengeance. 

Read next

Julie Bort was Business Insider's Editor at Large for the Tech team. She loves investigating stories and shedding light on the tech industry's most amazing people.Here's a small sample of some of Julie's work.Former Pinterest employees describe a traumatic workplace where managers humiliate employees until they cry, Black people feel alienated, and the toxic culture 'eats away at your soul'Sex, tequila, and a tiger: Employees inside Adam Neumann's WeWork talk about the nonstop party to attain a $100 billion dream and the messy reality that tanked itInsiders say WeWork's IT is a patchwork of cheap devices and Band-Aid fixes that will take millions to fixWeWork's toxic phone booths were created in-house by its Powered by We business70-hour weeks and 'WTF' emails: 42 employees reveal the frenzy of working at Tesla under the 'cult' of Elon MuskElon Musk works so many hours at Tesla, employees are constantly finding him asleep under tables and desksHow this woman went from a Pizza Hut employee to a founder of a $4 billion startupAn Oracle insider explains how some salespeople gamed the system to sell more cloudTHE TAKEDOWN OF TRAVIS KALANICK: The untold story of Uber's infighting, backstabbing, and multimillion-dollar exit packagesMicrosoft is in talks to buy GitHub, a startup at the center of the software world last valued at $2 billionThe alarming inside story of a failed Google acquisition, and an employee who was hospitalizedInside Facebook's plan to eat another $350 billion IT marketHow a registered sex offender wound up living in an Airbnb hosting unsuspecting guestsA controversial ex-banker is the person who really runs Twitter — and he's gambling the company's future on one risky betSecret passages and skipped meals: Oracle's CEO gave us a rare peek at what it really takes to run a $37 billion companyHP told some employees to choose between becoming contractors with no benefits or being fired without severance'I felt like we were being extorted': Customer says Oracle tried to strong-arm him into a cloud saleHow the queen of Silicon Valley is helping Google go after Amazon's most profitable businessAirbnb host: A guest is squatting in my condo and I can't get him to leaveLIES, BOOZE, AND BILLIONS: How one of the fastest-growing startups in Silicon Valley history raised $580 million then spiraled out of controlGitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart — and we have the full inside storyWhen she's not writing for Business Insider, Julie can usually be found on the trails, on my mountain bike, or on my skis, if you know where to look.