Oracle Cloud Infrastructure vs. Salesforce Agentforce Marketing

As per our usage Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for almost 6 years hosting 500 + customers I can say its well suited application for any small scale to larger scale application as it can handle that capacity and provide more reliable cloud service only if you need any messaging service like pub/sub or sqs better to consider other services.

Incentivized

I think the product, by definition, is meant for marketing — and we use it exactly for that, for running campaigns. That’s the best-suited use case for the product. I don’t think it’s really meant to be used for anything else — that’s just not how it’s designed.

Incentivized

• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has a generous free tier, moreso than other hyperscalers, with an always-free tier that guarantees certain products are always free
• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure allows you to size VMs with differing combinations of CPU and RAM, which is contrary to other hyperscalers that have specific pre-defined combinations only
• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure regularly provides free certification exam offers

Incentivized

• Filter relevant content so you can priorize those that are more relevant and resolve it first
• Measure the traffic in the different social networks, as well as the response rate, average response time and other relevant metrics
• Configure automation rules to order the work of those who must interact with the customer

Incentivized

• Navigating the UI takes lots of getting used to. It reminds me of older GCP (just to get used to where everything is).
• Permission for different things always seemed to be more difficult than it really needed to be. Once you got them set up you were good but updating anything or creating new permissions for just about anything took longer than I thought it should.
• Based on how the buttons were laid out, it was pretty easy to delete all of your DNS records, and backing them up was not as intuitive as I'd like with the UI, but it was easy to do using a script.

Incentivized

• The email builder does not offer any way to catch/check bugs across different email service providers
• Creating SQL is not as easy as drag-and-drop; a lot of technical knowledge is required
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud is sold as a marketing tool, but to be honest, you need a LOT of technical IT support to run the tool
• Einstein metrics are across the board; if you have multiple audiences in one instance of Salesforce Marketing Cloud you can't segment the data.

Incentivized

Reliability: Very dependable and stable OCI services have been for the business operations.Performance: The speed and efficiency of OCI in meeting their computing and storage needs.Scalability: The ease and effectiveness of scaling resources up or down to accommodate changing demands.Security: The robustness and effectiveness of OCI's security features in protecting their data and applications.

Incentivized

As of right now we have not seen any other program that integrates as seamlessly into our Salesforce platform. We have barely scratched the surface of all the features and use cases. It would be irresponsible to make a move to another platform in the near future. We have not come up against any limitations that would prompt a need to switch

The services & products in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure needs more improvement to beat other Cloud service providers. The price is good & Security processes are good. We are requiring to put more effort in supporting this Oracle Cloud Infrastructure than other Cloud service providers. Probably better ways are there but is not super easy to find or not super available

You won't find another solution that has as many features as Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio. We all know Salesforce, we all know how big they are and it's not for nothing... Their tools do most of the things you want, need and even imagine. Using it is complicated, but the usability is infinite.

Incentivized

Yeah sometimes we had to face unplanned outages due to underlying infrastructure issues, so not every time,e but once in a while we face issues with availability. But the good thing is we have redundancy with DR setup and multi region so we can manage.

Incentivized

Upgrades and timing of the upgrades were communicated well and planned during off hours for our work. If we did have a campaign scheduled during that time, it would kick-off after the system was back active. There were a few unplanned system down times, but it was a rare occurrence and those times were also short in duration.

From the start, I was surprised by response times and image quality accessing windows VMs with RDP. GCP, Azure and -many offerings in AWS- don't perform this speed. Also, that's evident in the quality of Infrastructure Management Team, because I just received one warning regarding a region failure, what confirms that's a mature platform.

Incentivized

Though the make up of MA apps is not built this way today, it would be nice to see them become more real-time. The integration between Salesforce and Pardot is not a true real-time integration. If I modify something in Salesforce, those changes are not automatically reflected in Pardot immediately. There is a delay of about 15 minutes before the systems sync. This delay, although not long, is less than ideal We would love the systems to be integrated real time such that changes are propagated from one system to the other immediately.

Overall it is amazing, there is always room for improvement. We have weekly updates that tend to slow the program used more and more. We had to change some reports within Oracle because the others wouldn’t load. This is tied to our payroll and the delays are causing many time constraint issues and panic. We have to create a new report when one breaks. Otherwise awesome!

Incentivized

They are really responsive and more than not solve the problem or give you insight to how you can manage the solution yourself. I do find however sometimes a long delay on the more complex issues when they need to loop in other departments. but overall a good experience with support

Incentivized

Effective training provided, much data productivity while doing training

Incentivized

The trainers at the Pardot user conference (Elevate and Connections) were very knowledgeable and presented the material well. Again, the content was targeted to more of a new user audience, and was not really relevant for folks who had been using the product for 2+ years.

detailed and easy to understand.

Incentivized

Pardot's online training touches on all topics briefly and vaguely without much indepth exploration into how a final outcome could look, such as Nurturing Campaigns, Email templates, landing page templates, etc... The only true way to uncover Pardot's full capabilities is to have Front End design and coding experience. Without this key skill set, I would not recommend Pardot to another business.

Easier way to implement, vary much supportive way doing the implementation

Incentivized

From an IT perspective, once you set up the Javascript beacon and start collecting data there is a waiting game. During this time you can start labeling your site actions which can be labor intensive for a single person, but you don't really have the final end-users on the platform yet. We did a lot of training so users were experienced, but it wasn't until they had their first tasks to accomplish that they started using the system and had questions. I'd recommend setting up some immediate goals for an end-user to start segmenting for the purpose of displaying message campaigns so you can jump start end-user action.

We used Microsoft Azure and Docker earlier and faced some difficulties like Microsoft Azure and Docker. Occasionally, the generation of large images can delay deployment. It is also necessary for me to admit that Microsoft Azure and Docker have a somewhat steep learning curve. Proper paperwork needs to be there. Docker has issues with performance on a number of platforms. On the other hand, OCI is easy to deploy and easy to understand.

Incentivized

We use Salesforce Marketing Cloud for lead management, generating reports, tracking customer and dealer information, inputting orders, and more. I prefer HubSpot for email marketing and automation because it is easier to use and the emails are designed much better. We currently use Salesforce and HubSpot, and we are very happy to have both, as they have different pros/cons.

Incentivized

was not part of initial purchase team. Anyways, i think unit pricing and billing frequency is good compared to other Cloud service providers, when it comes to Cloud Capital expenditure & Operational expenditure. Would be more interested in exploring more options where customers can get more cost relaxations on trying out new cloud services in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for example a new App or a feature

was not involved with this part but i have not heard about clompaints

Incentivized

We have hosted around 500 + customers on this cloud so till day not faced any major issues, so we can use it for any kind of products and it can hold the load and easily scale based on need.

Incentivized

Prior to this, we had no solution and literally were doing things on paper in a world where technology is outpacing paper. Having this process optimized has made it easier for the sales and marketing people to change information. From the training perspective, it has allowed us to see holes in where we could create additional support training, so the ROI here has been a lot more than just the optimization of a process.

Incentivized

Services & Infra wise is ok to use & host applications & services. Security wise also good for a Cloud service provider. It is a interesting area to explore & using it for day to day needs can be further improvised in future probably. Modern day Services like AI and Machine learning could be improved

• Oracle Cloud helps us build and deploy apps quickly, getting our products out the door faster.
• With real-time insights from Oracle Cloud, we can give customers personalized experiences that boost satisfaction.
• Migrating to Oracle saves us cash on hardware and maintenance, which we can use for innovation and growth.

Incentivized

• Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows us to more efficiently reach out to a higher number of prospects.
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows us to nimbly communicate important messages in a timely fashion to facilitate conversion.
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows us to track who is opening our messages so that we can stop sending to those not interested and focus on the most engaged audiences.

Incentivized