Oracle is competing against firms like Adobe and Salesforce.com to sell cloud-based software used for marketing business-to-business products that typically cost thousands of dollars or more.

It thinks there is money to be made in business-to-business campaigns which produce a "qualified lead" - that is, a person whom a salesperson can call to start a conversation that eventually turns into a sale. Low quality leads cost money because they waste salespeople's time.

Oracle's Fusion Marketing system uses artificial intelligence to automatically assemble marketing campaigns and determine whether the people who interact with emails or advertisements might eventually buy a product, sending their contact information to sales teams.

The system sucks in data from a variety of sources. Some of the data, like email contact lists, will come from the Oracle customers who use the system. And some of the data will come from massive marketplaces of third-party data that Oracle has acquired in recent years to grow its digital advertising business.

Rob Tarkoff, executive vice president or Oracle's advertising and customer experience cloud, said digital marketing campaigns were “a big computer science problem, and we're going to go solve it".