Oracle bets on unified ECM suite

NEW DELHI, INDIA: Oracle Corporation is betting big on its Unified Enterprise Content Management (ECM) offering completing its acquisition of Stellent in December 2006.

Oracle has integrated Stellent’s technology and it delivers a new generation of advanced content management products that are integrated components of the Oracle Fusion Middleware product family.

“The explosive growth of the unstructured data such as documents, email messages, images, videos and other digital content is creating a management headache for companies faced with the need to comply with data retention regulations,” Bill Kearney, general manager, Enterprise Content Management, Asia Pacific Division, Oracle Corporation told CyberMedia News.

“Beyond compliance, however, information and knowledge management professionals are looking for Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems to bring order to content chaos and enabling companies to maximize business value from their digital assets,” he said.

ECM systems are used for capturing, storage, security, revision control, retrieval, distribution, preservation and destruction of documents and other digital content.

Kearney said that following the $440 million acquisition and integration of Stellent Inc. in 2006, Oracle now offers complete ECM platforms, enabling companies to leverage the full value of their digital content in a dynamic, task-oriented user environment.

“Oracle’s new ECM suite will offer an opportunity for organizations to standardize on a single content management platform that provides web content, document, digital assets and records management along with scalable imaging capabilities pre-integrated with enterprise applications – all backed by Oracle’s expertise in information management,” he added.

The integrated ECM suite includes Universal Content Management, Universal Records Management, and Imaging and Process Management.

The company is expected to deliver new releases for all its content management products within the next 12-months.

“India is an intensive market for Oracle ECM solutions as there is voluminous data. We see good opportunity in all the industries, especially government, BFSI, manufacturing, ITeS, engineering and construction, and media verticals. Rolling out of the e-governance initiatives by the government will provide much more opportunities for us as there will be similar data residing in different portals of various state government portals,” Kearney added.

Gartner estimates that the ECM market will be worth approximately $2.9 billion in 2007 and expects it to grow at 12.9 per cent per year through 2011.

According to IDC forecast in March 2007 on Worldwide Content Management Software for 2007-2011, the market stratified and had a continued growth. The analyst firm pegged the growth at a CAGR of 10.7 per cent, significantly outperforming the software market as a whole.

The content management software market grew at 9.7 per cent to $35 billion in 2006 fueled by the ongoing need of organizations both large and small to better manage their unstructured data and better leverage content in the context of their key business processes.

IDC predicts that the content management market in Asia Pacific will enjoy a five-year CAGR of 10.8 per cent to reach $ 385 million by year 2011.