Byrne Tony Byrne

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Oracle and Open Text: Prelude to a marriage?

15-Jun-2006

Tags: Document Management (ECM), Marketplace at Large,

Oracle and ECM vendor Open Text separately announced a new partnership yesterday. This is interesting because Oracle has traditionally not partnered closely with content management suppliers, arguing instead that vendors should take advantage of repository services built into Oracle's database product -- something those vendors have been loathe to do in the interest of supporting other major databases. But SharePoint has changed everything and now ECM vendors are beginning to relegate basic library services (like versioning) to infrastructure vendors. It's no secret that Open Text and arch-rival Hummingbird have been in play; Microsoft reputedly considered and then took a pass on each of them (both historically close to Redmond). Hummingbird made a pitch to go private last month. There aren't many suitors left for Open Text, but Oracle might not make a bad match, even if the 2 companies' product sets overlap a bit across search, collaboration, and records management. Among other benefits, Open Text would bring some interesting imaging and asset management capabilities, but unfortunately, Open Text really doesn't help Oracle with the latter's glaring absence of a real Web CMS tool.

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