Is Eloqua End of life?

Simon Kaufmann

I'd like to have the opinion from the Eloqua User Community on the following aussumption. Is Eloqua End of life?

Personally I'm not really happy with the amount of new features which have been rolled out within the last few years. Compared to other marketing automation providers on the market, there was not a lot of innovation in my opinion. If there are some new state of the art features, they are beeing sold as overprized "add-ons" (advanced intelligence) wich you need to have an additional licence for.

There is also no transparency about the Eloqua's roadmap. The last information on this I've found is from September 2021 (correct me if I'm wrong). I do not really see what is planned for the next year(s).

Also I hear more and more rumors from the agency environment that its unclear what the future Oracle CRM/CX Marketing-Strategy is. Some people even saying Oracle wants to get rid of the whole CRM/CX Marketing part.

But the most dissapointing part for me is how Oracle/Eloqua handles its feature requests from its clients. There is not a clear process and especially commitment from Oracle side. The dream it section here is more like an 90ies/00ies discussion board. When you are very lucky somebody from Oracle is answering your request / ideas. There is no transparency if request are beeing checked, if they are getting added to some release cycles etc. In my opinion Oracle should get at least obligated to give its client feedback on their request. I'm working together with other SaaS providers where feature request are handled in way more structured/agile way with defined SLAs etc.

I really do not understand why Oracle/Eloqua is not using its knowledge from its users/clients. If I read through the Dream It section i see so many great ideas / major improvements not getting recognized.

All this together brings me to the assumption that Oracle is may thinking about stop developing eloqua or is even trying to sell it. This would be a shame as I still think Eloqua is a great product, but it definitely needs more innovation, speed and consideration of what its client wants.

Thamina Christensen-Oracle

Hi @Simon Kaufmann ,

I am a Director of Product Management on the Eloqua team and I would like to share our vision with you. First and foremost, Eloqua is not going away. When rumors swirl, it can be hard to discern between fact and fiction. The fact here is Oracle is heavily investing in our marketing applications and CX. We know that customers such as yourself depend on Eloqua to deliver your marketing strategy and campaigns, and we will continue to support the investments you have made by continuing to provide you with market-leading technology and innovation. At Oracle CloudWorld, we announced the vision and strategy for Oracle Fusion Marketing and how our future direction aligns across Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications (CX, ERP, HCM, etc.). Eloqua specifically is the power behind that Fusion Marketing demo and we (Eloqua) are the marketing foundation and power behind these guided workflows.

Additionally, we were recently announced as a leader in the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms. As part of this report, we provided our future roadmap and a detailed demo of Eloqua to the analysts. I share this to give you an outside Oracle point of view that Eloqua is investing for the future and is seen as competitive with the other players in the field. You can see part of that roadmap we shared with the analysts in our March 2022 roadmap that we published here for our customers and we will be publishing a new roadmap on Topliners next week.

I agree that the Dream It section of this community has not worked as well as we on the product team had hoped. One of the challenges is features we have delivered on are not easy to archive and with so many posts, we also can’t quickly identify duplicate entries. We’re in the process of revitalizing our community strategy, including how we manage customer enhancement requests and feedback via Dream It to bring more transparency on how we deliver on these requests. These changes will go into effect in 2023. We also recently had a Hack Day with our engineering team that focused on feature requests in Dream It and we hope to deliver the winning teams' functionality to all of you in one of our summer 2023 releases. 

I challenge your assumption about not recognizing or implementing customer feature requests and that we are not developing or selling Eloqua. We are actively investing in Eloqua which includes an overhaul of the entire user experience to align with Oracles new Redwood theming that all Oracle’s cloud applications are adopting. A sneak peak will be shared in our 23A (February) release. By 23B (May), all of our Eloqua instances will be moved off older infrastructure and running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure that brings greater stability and reliability to our customers. This has been a huge effort that we are tremendously proud of. These are only two examples that bring modern technology to Eloqua and will be a benefit to all of our customers. I am excited about the innovations on the roadmap for Eloqua and look forward to sharing more updates with you and our customers in the coming months.

I would be happy to schedule time with you individually to talk through your specific pain points and walk you through our roadmap including demoing the new user experience. You can contact me directly at [email protected] to arrange a time.

Thanks,

Thamina