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Apoorv Durga

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Oracle doesn't eat its own blog food

22-Jul-2008

Tags: Enterprise Collaboration & Social Software, Marketplace at Large, Selecting Technology, Movable Type, WebCenter Suite

Via numerous acquisitions, Oracle has built up a formidable collection of products that they sell for Portals, Content Management, Web 2.0, and other content technologies. As a result, customers find considerable overlap in functionality and often there are multiple options for doing same things. Consider blog services:

Oracle WebCenter page lists "...services such as wikis, blogs, discussions..." as one of the benefits

BEA AquaLogic Pages (now part of Oracle) touts "Drag-and-drop simplicity for creating wikis, blogs and basic Web applications"

Stellent had a blog module even before it got acquired by Oracle

So its perhaps a bit surprising that when it came to their own blogs, Oracle chose to migrate to Six Apart's Movable Type.

We had cautioned about lack of a decent blog functionality in Oracle stack in our recently released Enterprise Social Software Report 2008. Well to be fair to Oracle, they are not the only ones -- many other product vendors use 3rd-party blog and wiki products for specific functionality. Blog migrations are never easy, but Oracle seems to have pulled it off successfully.

So if you are a buyer of similar technologies, remember that:

1. If a product vendor is selling you a suite that claims to do everything, be very cautious and ask for real life examples and demos
2. A product suite might not be the best option; keep your options open and consider point solutions for specific requirements

It's quite possible that Oracle uses one of its own blog packages behind its firewall. But when ECM vendors put their trust in best-of-breed tools for high-profile, publicly-facing sites, perhaps there's a lesson there.