The long-standing rivarly between Oracle and cloud CRM kingpin Salesforce.com turned up a notch last Friday with the database maker’s acquisition of online marketing specialist Responsys. The deal is valued at $27 per share, a 38 percent premium over the firm’s closing price on Thursday and the equivalent of about $1.5 billion.

The San Bruno, Calif.-based Responsys builds software that helps enterprises scale their advertising campaigns across the entire digital ecosystem, including social media and mobile. The vendor boasts more than 450 customers in a “wide range” of industries.

“Recognizing the unique needs of the CMO in B2B and B2C industries, the Oracle Marketing Cloud is now the only platform to unite enterprise-class leaders in these historically distinct marketing-automation fields,” Oracle president Mark Hurd noted in a statement. “Our strategy of combining the leaders across complementary technologies signifies Oracle’s overwhelming commitment to winning and serving the CMO better than any other software company in the world,” he said.

The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2014, pending regulatory and shareholder approval. Oracle plans to package the Responsys Interact product suite with Eloqua, the automation component of its end-to-end Customer Experience Cloud, in a move to reposition against Salesforce’s marketing offering and ultimately grab a bigger chunk of the market.

Larry Ellison’s firm has something of a love-hate relationship with the SaaS provider. The two vendors are fierce competitors, but have nonetheless reached common ground in the enterprise, having agreed to integrate their hosted offerings in June as part of a nine-year partnership spanning the full spectrum of cloud services. Salesforce also committed to standardizing on Oracle’s so-called Red Stack and Fusion HCM and Financial applications.