Oracle & OpenText : Getting Engaged

Open Text signs to utilize Oracle Content is important in a few ways. First it potentially quells the rumout that Filenet may be acquired by Oracle ( we can’t say that with 100% certainity knowing oracle and its impressive numbers shown this quarter). Clearly the enterprise-wide content management capabilities are increasingly becoming attractive to infrastructure providers, with ECM vendors gearing to provide more specialized content management capabilities.

ECM space, a phenomenally high growth area in the last few years is expected to clock a very healthy growth moving forward. In many ways the regulatory pressures are also driving adoption of ECM in a big way. By using Oracle Content Database as an underlying infrastructure, Open Text is in many ways making its solution more powerful. This leaves Open Text to keep focusing on building content-enabled solutions to solve innovative, industry-specific problems. Seen from an oracle perspective, this is a shift as oracle traditionally advocated the repository built into the database as the ideal approach, an idea which the ECM vendors were resisting. With intensifying competition form the likes of Microsoft, Open Text may have opted to take a more pragmatic approach –more pragmatism may eventually lead into a marriage between the two companies.The broken model of the enterprise software industry is complicating things towards adopting newer things (Part of the reason for SAP to keep gaining marketshare). As I wrote earlier, a careful examination shows that well evolved industries move towards a decentralized/tiered model – currently the enterprise software industry is highly integrated vertically and its ecosystem is not well set today.