Oracle^® Marketing Segmentation Guide > Installing and Administering Segmentation and List Generation >

About Marketing Segmentation

Segmentation is the practice of dividing a customer base into groups that are similar in specific ways such as demographics or behavior that are relevant to marketing. Marketers use segmentation to effectively target groups of customers and allocate marketing resources.

Typically, customer segmentation involves the following activities:

• Determining what data to collect.
• Collecting data from a variety of sources and integrating the data into a single view of the customer base.
• Determining the quantity of customers or potential customers who share certain characteristics.
• Identifying a group of target customers for the purpose of delivering a marketing treatment or message.

Oracle Sales Cloud users interact with information in Oracle Business Intelligence Applications (OBIA) and Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence (OTBI) using Oracle BI Enterprise Edition components (such as Answers and Dashboards). The OBIA warehouse is a unified data repository for all customer-centric data, used to support the analytical requirements of Oracle Business Intelligence Applications. Oracle Business Intelligence Applications supplies the warehouse database schema and the logic that extracts data from the Oracle Sales Cloud transactional database and loads it to the warehouse.

Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence is real-time self service component reporting directly off application data where you can create your own reports using prepackaged functional metadata. OTBI is co located and semantically integrated with the data warehousing metadata and can read security, flex fields and trees from the Oracle Sales Cloud marketing application.

For Oracle's Siebel Marketing users, the Siebel Business Analytics has been renamed Oracle Business Intelligence. For more information about Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, which was formerly known as Siebel Business Analytics, see the relevant documentation for the version of the software that you are running on the Oracle Technology Network:

• For versions earlier than 10.1.3.2, see Oracle's Siebel Business Analytics Platform documentation.
• For versions 10.1.3.2 or later, see the Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition documentation.