Oracle Buys Social Media Marketing Company Vitrue For $300 Million

Sites include Oracle.com . Published on June 10th, 2012. Written by Anthony West.

Oracle has been busy lately fighting Google over patents worth billions so it’s a bit of surprise to see the company taking a breather and splashing out $300 million on an acquisition.

Oracle made a press release recently confirming the purchase of social media marketing company Vitrue. Though the release didn’t confirm the actual price tag of the acquisition, several sources had confirmed that Oracle was indeed paying upwards of $300 million for the company.

Vitrue, which had a recent injection of $33 million in funding, is one of the top marketing companies which help other companies manage their presence across social media platforms. It is most popular for helping companies build a database of Facebook fans, but its wider offerings go as far as Pinterest and Twitter.

$300 million for a company that has just recently got $33 million in funding is a massive gamble but analysts are citing Oracle’s (and other so-called ‘Old internet companies) desire to grow inorganically in the social media space. Many point to Adobe’s 2011 acquisition of social advertising provider Efficient Frontier for $400 million.

Company’s like Oracle who didn’t invest in seed companies like Facebook and Twitter are now finding that it’s going to cost them dearly to keep up. Still, these companies [Oracle] have billions at their disposal and so can afford to do this sort of thing.