Oracle buys Stellent

By Jessica Twentyman

ORACLE HAS put an end to industry speculation about its intentions in the enterprise content management (ECM) market with the purchase of Stellent in a $440m deal. The transaction is expected to close by the end of 2006.

The acquisition will boost Oracle’s credibility in an ECM market that is consolidating rapidly, thanks to the recent acquistions of FileNet and Hummingbird by IBM and Open Text, respectively.

Although Oracle has made a number of announcements about its fledgling Oracle Content Database product, analysts and industry watchers have previously accused the company of too much talk, and little action. The Oracle Content Database, they say, really only addresses the storage infrastructure aspect of content management, enabling companies to store and centrally manage unstructured content in Oracle databases.

With the acquisition of Stellent’s Universal Content Management suite, Oracle can now sell a full suite of applications to manage documents, e-mail, web content, images, records and other unstructured information throughout their lifecycle.

“Oracle’s initial push into content management brought it a significant seven-figure deal with [US insurance provider] Allstate, but it was still having difficulty establishing credibility in content management and serving various customer needs outside of core repository services,” says Jim Murphy, an analyst with AMR Research.

“Stellent brings it more technology to meet end-to-end needs, from content capture and imaging to content publishing,” he adds. However, the task of integrating Stellent with its existing offerings will present quite a challenge, especially in light of the fact that Oracle has spent about $20 billion since early 2005 acquiring 25 different software companies, including the major business application providers PeopleSoft and Siebel Systems.