Oracle looks to take a bigger bite of Facebook’s juicy apple with Involver buy

Three months and three major social-software acquisitions for Oracle.

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The enterprise software and hardware company now clearly has some not-so-secret ambitions to get ahold of a healthy chunk of the marketing budgets allocated to Facebook.

Following a May purchase of social marketing startup Vitrue and a June buy of social media monitoring company Collective Intellect, Oracle today announced that it is acquiring five-year-old social marketing platform and Facebook preferred developer Involver for an undisclosed sum.

Involver is the maker of a platform used by more than 1 million brands and agencies, and it’s best known as the startup that helps brands and marketers build rich applications for their Facebook pages. The company is also the developer of many of Facebook’s own marketing applications.

“The combination of Involver with Oracle is expected to create the most advanced and comprehensive cloud-based social solution, across marketing, sales, and service touch points,” Involver president and CEO Don Beck wrote in a post on the company’s blog. “Our technology is expected to extend Oracle’s social platform to help customers more easily and cost-effectively collaborate and build engaging applications and social experiences across social networks and the Open Graph.”

With its third recent buy in the space, Oracle is signaling to customers, investors, the world, and maybe even Salesforce (which purchased Buddy Media for $689 million) that it’s quite serious about becoming a social services provider. The three-month shopping spree should help the company, not often associated with social prowess, offer its enterprise clientele a full arsenal of tools to accomplish most of their social marketing needs.

San Francisco-based Involver raised roughly $10 million in funding, including an $8 million round in October 2010, prior to its sale. The deal is expected to close this summer.

Photo credit: Andreas-photography/Flickr