Disruptive Conversations

In an intriguing development today, Oracle announced that it will be acquiring Involver, a startup with a platform to help you rapidly build Facebook apps that work with your Facebook Pages.

I first experimented with Involver a year or two ago when I was trying to add some interactivity to a Facebook Page for my previous employer. Involver had some useful options and while the fit wasn't there with what I wanted to do, I did keep monitoring how they were evolving.

No terms of the deal were announced, although TechCrunch is naturally continuing to try to determine the cost. The TechCrunch piece also has some more information about other ways Involver has been used.

How does Involver fit with Oracle? As both the TechCrunch article and a Business Insider article note, Oracle just recently acquired Vitrue, another social media marketing/engagement platform and has made a number of other acquisitions in the "social" space. For their part, Oracle has published a presentation about Involver that shows Oracle's view of how all the pieces fit together:

Time will tell if the pieces do all fit nicely together, but in the meantime Oracle is clearly looking to be a player in helping enterprises connect with their customers over social channels.

Congrats to the Involver team and I do hope this all works out well for them - and for their customers.

P.S. Involver's Don Beck published a blog post providing their viewpoint on the acquisition.

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