Oracle has already made several strategic acquisitions, and is adding another interesting one in November 2006 with the 440 million USD acquisition of Stellent. With IBM buying FileNet, Open Text picking up Hummingbird and Documentum becoming EMC's jewel of its software crown, the acquisition of Stellent was not really a surprise. But the fact that Oracle grabbed Stellent and not IBM, SAP or Microsoft, came as a surprise to many analysts, particularly because Oracle had a multi-vendor strategy for its Content DB as middleware for ECM vendors. E.g. Open Text is an important partner of Oracle Content DB, and hence another acquisition candidate for Oracle. Although Oracle offers all the necessary components to solve content management, it did not have an off-the-shelf solution. The acquisition of Stellent looks like a smart one because this is an excellent dedicated solution for ECM with a strong focus on Sarbanes-Oxley and compliance processes, but also because it has 4700 dedicated customers, which Oracle may now be targeting as database, Content DB and Fusion middleware customers.
Both Stellent and Open Text are - together with IBM and EMC/Documentum - in the best quadrant of Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management of October 2006, as you can see in Michiel Hazen's blog and in this Gartner MQ reprint at Stellent's Web site (in PDF).
More at Stellent (the official press release), Jason Wood's blog (comments from a market watcher) and Bridging a gap to Oracle's middleware (the broader picture).
Posted by admin at November 10, 2006 08:42 AM