Eloqua's CRM-Integrative Web Services API Released

By David Sims

TMCnet Contributing Editor

 

Eloqua, a vendor of demand generation products for business-to-business marketers, reportedly has announced the Eloqua Web Services Application Programming Interface, a Web Services API for marketing automation.

 

The release extends the reach of Eloqua’s demand generation applications, company officials say, since by using the product “organizations can integrate any application, service or non-standard Customer Relationship Management system with their Eloqua product.”

 

This functionality dovetails with Eloqua’s integration with such CRM systems as Salesforce.com, Siebel On-Demand and Microsoft (News - Alert) CRM.

 

Eloqua’s Web Services API is for marketing automation developed with a pure simple object access protocol API, letting Eloqua’s customers and partners “integrate the Eloqua Conversion Suite into any business application or service,” company officials say.

 

Web services provide benefits for businesses that need the ability to extract and use vast amounts of data from disparate enterprise applications, scattered data sources and incompatible computing platforms.

 

Eloqua Conversion Suite is available in Enterprise, Team and Express editions for businesses from small companies to global enterprises.

 

Earlier this week, ReachForce, a provider of OnDemand software and data services for targeted lead generation, announced the integration of its role-based contact data services with Eloqua’s demand generation applications.

 

Business-to-business marketers can use the resulting product to “build custom role-based contact databases to fuel their multi-modal marketing campaigns” executed through Eloqua’s marketing automation platform, ReachForce officials say.

 

ReachForce products are pitched to marketing and sales teams as providing “the ability to target their initiatives at the right decision maker at the right company, every time.” The product identifies a person’s role within an organization instead of just a title, company officials say.

 

With the integration of ReachForce, Eloqua customers can now “request and build role-based contact lists instantly from within Eloqua’s Marketing Automation platform,” Eloqua officials say.

 

In June, ReachForce announced that it had surpassed the 200 customer mark.

 

With the addition of 31 new customers in the first quarter of 2008, ReachForce has reached “a new high,” company officials say, when another 13 current customers renewed their commitment to ReachForce. New customers include GBH Communications, Quova, Innography and Ping Identity.

 

Suaad Sait, chief executive officer of ReachForce, said the company sells real-time predictive analytics software “to target the right companies and data services to find the right role-based contacts within those companies.”