Eloqua is the Industry Standard for Marketing Automation for a Good Reason.

If you are an enterprise company, Oracle Eloqua is the platform for you. The choices after that seem to take into account sacrificing certain aspects of marketing automation in exchange for a lower cost. If you want a scalable tool, this is the one for you. They have years on their closest competitor which means a lot more integration experience and native connections than possible with other tools. For an SMB, you have a lot of options in the space and using Eloqua might be like driving a Ferrari to pick up groceries; however, they have a pricing model and edition trim for SMB, as well. You don't have to drive the Ferarri, there is a grocery-getter, as well.

I have used the tool for 7 years mostly in conjunction with Salesforce.com and the integration between those two systems is cake-walk. The amount of time these two have been partners really shows in it's native connectivity strength.

Some features that likely only a power user/consultant would notice were deprecated in E10, but are slowly making their way back due to E9 fan-fare. The front-end application has transferred so much functionality to the entry-level user allowing them to build affective emails, email nutures, etc giving regular marketing users the ability to do more with less and rely less on power users who can now focus on the harder stuff for unique business cases in program builder, etc.

Eloqua is Software-as-a-Service and is constantly being patched and upgraded, so naturally there are some quirks and bugs. I understand this. If I wanted static software that was bulletproof, I would buy a CD. Hang tight and these issues will get resolved. 7 years of experience with Eloqua is telling you this.

One area that has fallen behind is the Eloqua Support, likely due to the acquisition and hoping this is just a growing pain, which is the impression that I am getting. There are a few more hoops to jump through and the new Oracle Support interface wasn't the easiest to transition into, but once you have tickets open--they get responded to just like before.