When Oracle acquired Eloqua in December 2012, Jill Rowley was ready to head for the door. Not only was Ms. Rowley, an Eloqua sales rep, assigned to Salesforce, one of Oracle’s top competitors, but she questioned the company’s commitment to the cloud, where Eloqua’s software lived.
“No way is this happening to me. No way,” she recalled thinking at the time. “I had spent over a decade building this company, building this space, and Oracle, to me, did not know cloud, didn’t understand cloud, hadn’t taken it seriously, hadn’t developed any great cloud products in my knowledge — this was a nightmare.”