Why Oracle just bought a marketing company called Maxymiser

Oracle on Thursday announced that it was buying New York marketing-tech company Maxymiser for an undisclosed sum.

Maxymiser was founded in 2006 and had raised about $15 million in venture funding through 2012 and then a round of undisclosed private equity investment in 2013, according to Crunchbase. Later that same year, two of the three founders left to launch other startups.

The third founder, Mark Simpson, who is president, is moving to Oracle with the deal, according this video he put out with Oracle about it. CEO Tim Brown is also joining Oracle, according to the press release, as are an estimated 400 employees. Maxymiser is headquartered in New York with multiple US offices and offices in Edinburgh, London, Germany and the Ukraine.

Maxymiser is famous for a/b testing, where marketeers can try different options for their marketing campaigns to see which ones work best. It names HSBC, EPSON, Virgin Media, Alaska Airlines, Harry & David, Progressive and Office Depot as customers.

The product will be integrated into Oracle's Marketing Cloud in a deal signed off by Oracle's rising star head of engineering, Thomas Kurian.

Oracle wanted Maxymiser because of a big trend going on at big companies. Chief Marketing Officers now command huge budgets for tech and software. By 2017, CMOs are expected to outspend CTOs on tech, so software companies like Oracle, Salesforce, Adobe are going after this market with a vengeance.