The enterprise content management (ECM) market has consolidated rapidly over the last three or four years, and with IBM and Open Text picking up FileNet and Hummingbird last year, Oracle was left with very few options when it came to buying into this segment of the information management sector.
Despite some excellent technologies, a strong customer base and some very insightful acquisitions of its own, Minnesota-based Stellent was considered something of a wallflower in the ECM market by many industry watchers. But now, nearly a year after the acquisition, the Stellent legacy is beginning to shine through, as the world’s leading database and applications vendor adds Oracle Universal Records Management (URM) 10g R3 to the company’s portfolio of ECM products.
Priced at $100,000 per processor, and $10,000 per processor for adapters, Oracle URM isn’t cheap, but with built-in search facilities courtesy of Oracle Secure Enterprise Search (SES) and a keen focus on compliance and regulation, this latest offering might prove tempting even to non-Oracle shops.
However, interested parties should consider the bigger picture in the form of Oracle ECM, which brings together Oracle Universal Content Management, Oracle Imaging and Process Management, and Oracle URM at $150,000 per processor – a very competitive offer even in today’s aggressive ECM market.
Although Oracle will be targeting a number of sectors with this latest offering, the main thrust of its go-to-market campaign looks set to be that of simplifying the legal discovery process. With most Global 1,000 companies engaged in 100 or more non-frivolous lawsuits at any given time, anything that can help reduce the cost and risk associated with electronic discovery is bound to get the attention of the board.
Oracle is not going it alone in its push to grab a bigger share of this particular market, as it is joined by Zantaz (now owned by UK enterprise search and discovery vendor Autonomy), Iron Mountain, Symantec, and Wipro Technologies, among others. This lineup shows how savvy Oracle is when it comes to solution selling, and also recognizes the fact that project delivery expertise is just as important as technology when deploying records management solutions.
Oracle has a lot to prove as an ECM vendor. Its early offerings in the information management and collaboration space have received mixed reviews, and the decision to acquire Stellent was not greeted with universal applause. However, the company’s ECM product roadmap looks solid, and its service-oriented architecture-based product integration strategy promises to bring together a family of hitherto disconnected products, so Oracle is definitely one to watch over the coming months.
Source: OpinionWire by Butler Group (www.butlergroup.com)
