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Oracle and ECM

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Five years ago, when Oracle acquired Stellent with the aim that it will fit in the middleware tier, the first thing that came to my mind was that this is a good cross subsidy chip for Oracle to give out its Content Management free to everyone and entice them in buying more of Oracle Databases and Application Servers.

A lot of water has flown under the bridges since then but Oracle has never shown any interest in cross selling or subsidizing its UCM offering except for any specific RFP sent out to them. In-fact Microsoft was able to do the same quite successfully with SharePoint. Finally, when a couple of weeks ago when Oracle announced that it will give Oracle WebCenter (aka UCM, aka Stellent) free for all Documentum users as a trade-in, my  reaction was “too little too late”.

Documentum has been losing market share over the years. EMC doesn’t release sales figures individually for Documentum that makes it difficult to guess how much but the fact is that Documentum has lost from the leader in ECM space to number four. On Oracle’s part, it is safe to ask customers to move away from Documentum as there is sufficient negative publicity to Documentum and it is not in a position to retaliate well but I would have liked to see Oracle target more aggressively to other leaders like OpenText or even Microsoft. Microsoft and IBM are in position to retaliate strongly against oracle and I can understand the fear in Oracle to take them heads-on but taking up half of market share from OpenText and three fourths of non Life Sciences customers would be sufficient to propel Oracle to the leader in ECM space.

If I were in Oracle’s place, I would have asked the whole R&D to quickly prepare for a server that would come with Oracle Linux as the Operating System, Oracle as the database, WebLogic as the App Server and all of the Fusion Middleware installed on it with just an ability to put in a license code and enable to functionality. The benefit would have been that as a customer, I would not have to install any software, worry about compatibility or skills needed to deploy it or to size. Just build in relevant sizing logic in the system that can tell you that server A is good to run a CMS for 100 concurrent users. Server B is good for doing it for 500 users and so on. This would allow Oracle to provide its customer with one software, enable trials for them to evaluate products and most importantly, it will allow Business Units of a company to take charge of the servers without having to depend on IT department and that itself would have been a big advantage for many customers.

Oracle has done a very good strategic investment in Sun. It took them five years to do something good with the Stellent acquisition, I really hope they do something better with Sun than to just fight with Google over Java patents. Getting royalty money is easy money but that will not take Oracle very far. I can deposit all my money in bonds and earn yield on top of it but that is a non-ideal way to exploit it. Come on Oracle, there is a world out there, waiting for the next wave in ECM.

Comments

Nice informative post

Submitted by Binay Gupta November 15, 2011 - 10:23 AM

Nice post Dheeraj, informative and has a good analysis of the market.

Talking of Documentum, we all are seeing this downside move of the product. But I wonder why doesnt this reflect in the Forrester wave report or Gartner reports. I was looking at the Q4 wave report and they stil place EMC high enough in their quadrants. I feel either its EMC marketing to sell itself in these reports or it will take time for what we see to be reflected in these reports. But I agree its very evident that EMC is loosing their focus on Documentum to their Storage business.

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Oracle strategy was to integrate ECM into its broader product suite(s) first

Submitted by Christof van der Heide November 29, 2011 - 2:51 AM

Oracle had indeed limited focus to sell ECM products as standalone packages. I think this was/is a deliberate strategy for a number of reasons:
- By integrating the Stellent products closely with their different suites it allows for add on license sales at existing customers
- Potential customers for the Oracle ERP suites can be offered a more complete package
- Oracle, despite aqcuiring Stellent, had (and still has) a limited pool of ECM resources. In many countries even partners can only offer limited help either. For example in one of my projects I had to get resources from a different continent. For some components like URM it is even worse.
- Some of their ECM components were not the best. For example they advised against their own email management solution at a certain point and said it was going through extensive reengineering to significantly improve it.

In my opinion they do not go after OpenText because this would mean they will encounter many SAP integrations because of the OpenText and SAP relationship. Although this potentially also applies to Documentum. Obviously that would not be within their core competence.

Microsoft has a very different approach to ECM for which the UCM/URM products are not real replacement. I must admit that I have not followed the latest developments from UCM into Webcenter. However an obvious issue will be the pricing as Microsoft (Sharepoint) is significantly cheaper than Oracle. License revenue seems to be a very important performance measure at Oracle (and many other vendors).

Overall I think that this is, from an Oracle perspective, a good move to increase its market share but I am not sure it will increase revenues in the short term as many Documentum clients will already have Oracle Database licenses.

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This post and comment(s) reflect the personal perspectives of community members, and not necessarily those of their employers or of AIIM International