Companies who use data to construct a picture of an individual customer have a daunting challenge in front of them. On the one hand, there is “hard” data on transactions, buying patterns and vital consumer stats. On the other hand, there is now a universe of social networking “soft” data that can provide extremely pertinent insight into who the customer is and what kind of marketing will resonate with him or her. These are two different worlds that have to come together somehow to provide a rich consumer profile.

Chai Pydimukkala, senior director of Product Management and Product Strategy at Oracle, spoke to John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during a special On-the-Ground segment at Oracle’s Redwood Shores Headquarters about how data integration tools can help.

“If you want to really know your customers, what they are doing, you want to get the CRM [customer relationship management] data, which is your mission critical data,” he said. “But you also want to combine it with the social networking data — what do they like, what are they interacting with, what are they clicking on the website — so that you can combine both.”

The data superhighway

Pydimukkala said that the splitting and crisscrossing of data on-prem and on the cloud presents another layer of difficulty in combining data sets for insight.

“One of the key challenges we see is how do you get that data from on-premise to cloud, on cloud to on-premise? So that’s where data integration comes into play,” he explained.

He said that Oracle’s GoldenGate real-time data tool and its Data Flow machine learning service enables data integration and analytics across environments.

Watch the complete video interview with Chai Pydimukkala below:

Photo by SiliconANGLE