Oracle wants to be king of the content management hill

Oracle is gunning to spin into a more powerful kingpin in the hotly contested content management system market, not merely in the more amorphous middleware space -- as shown by its multibillion dollar buyout of BEA Systems along with a much quieter acquisition of a small CMS company called Captovation, both on Wednesday.

The move makes sense because, at the end of the day, content management is simply a vast extension of the database technology that was Oracle's original claim to fame.

Also offered by BEA, IBM, storage powerhouse EMC, document management specialist Xerox, and a shrinking pool of smaller vendors, content management systems are meant to help companies and individuals manage, search for, and quickly find not just the so-called "structured" information in traditional relational databases, but all of the other electronic content in an organization, too.

This "unstructured" information can include word processing documents, stored e-mails, scanned-in business letters, medical images, digitized video and audio files, and just about anything else you can imagine.

Content management systems are closely related to -- and sometimes even intertwined with -- enterprise portals, an area where Oracle is coming into intensifying rivalry with a number of other large vendors, including IBM, Microsoft, Sun, SAP, Red Hat -- a Linux vendor that now owns JBoss middleware -- and at least a dozen smaller players.

Even before yesterday's multi-billion dollar acquisition of BEA, Oracle already offered two separate portal systems: Oracle Portal and Oracle WebCenter.

But with BEA under its increasingly widening wings, Oracle owns four of these things, according to Janus Boye, a contributing analyst at CMS Watch.

Many observers are wondering how Oracle will handle BEA's content management, portal, and assorted other systems in relation to its own content management, portal, and Fusion middleware offerings.

"There's considerable doubt about Oracle's future plans for BEA," observed James Kobelius, senior analyst for data warehousing at Forrester Research.

At the same time, it's apparent to some content management analysts that Oracle has been using other acquisitions aside from BEA to bolster its own content management and portal strategies. And it seems more than possible that other deals in this category might follow.

Although by no means the only significant technology in portal architectures, content management systems (CMS) are important because they provide a way for people to access information located throughout the organization from a single Web-based portal interface.

But search capabilities are important to portals, too, for example. Just last week, in a teleconference held to discuss its own acquisition bid for Fast Search & Transfer, Microsoft played up the prospects of incorporating search technology from the Norwegian-based firm into its SharePoint enterprise portal architecture.

BEA Systems -- a company that like Oracle and Microsoft has expanded through acquisition -- uses two types of middleware infrastructures: a Java-based J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) architecture and a Web services-based SOA (Software-Oriented Architecture) environment.

BEA's J2EE-based WebLogic Portal architecture contains its own built-in content management system, for example. On the other hand, BEA's AquaLogic SOA architecture include a Data Services Platform for bringing together and managing information from manfiold data sources, including relational databases and Web services interfaces.

Meanwhile, during all the BEA buyout commotion on Wednesday, Oracle virtually sneaked in an acquisition of Captovation, a producer of the very same document capture technology used for scanning paper-based documents into content management systems.

Stellent, acquired by Oracle in 2006, also specializes in document capture, but on the high-end imaging side, said Alan Pelz-Sharpe, a CMS Watch analyst, in a research note.

Also in 2006, Oracle competitor IBM -- and also a long-time player in CM -- became the proud owner of FileNet, another major CMS entity.

Many of the smaller companies remaining in the CMS field grew up in vertical industries, where customers demanded management of specific types of content --such as legal or engineering documents -- and this scenario seems to fit in well with Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's often articulated vision of expanding Oracle's business through vertical software buyouts.

But generally speaking, this kind of consolidation in the CMS industry is leaving fewer choices for customers -- of vendors, at least, if not of products.

There's also more than a chance, though, that the technologies of smaller point players can be integrated by larger vendors in ways that lead to more feature-rich CMS systems for businesses.

But for the moment, customers using BEA's content management and portal capabilities are caught in the same bind as all other users of BEA's products.

Customers also use BEA's software as the basis for business intelligence (BI), data warehousing, and business process management (BPM) solutions, and to tie together packaged and custom software running in different operating environments, for example.

"BEA customers don't know what the future holds," Forrester's Kobelius told BetaNews. "They don't know whether they should continue to buy more BEA software, or whether they should wait until a joint roadmap has been put together."

But will Oracle -- or its competitors -- really try to snap up more companies in the CMS arena any time soon?

Open Text -- a company with software known for its own collaborative capabilities, among other features -- is the latest vendor rumored in CM circles to be the possible target of acquisition attempts.

Coincidentally, or so it might seem, last week, it was announced that Utility Service Company, Inc. (USCI) has chosen Open Text's Livelink ECM (Enterprise Content Management) - Accounts Payable solution for adding CM capabilities to that customer's implementation of Oracle E-Business Suite.