Oracle buys out Stellent, a content management software company
There is no stopping Oracle. For the last two-and-a-half year, it has been acquiring companies all around the globe. And yet another company gets acquired by Oracle. This time around it’s Stellent, a content management software company. Stellents content management software works across a most of the company's business applications—be they for public Web sites or internal governance management. On Thursday Oracle acquired Stellent for $13.50 per share or approximately $440 million. Reports suggest that the deal would be completed at the ed of this year or early 2007.
With Stellent Oracle would be more assured in about the functionality for handling unstructured and corporate data. The software also helps a variety of people across the organization to create, capture, store, manage, publish, view, search and archive all types of documents across their entire life cycle. Though Oracle's Content Database software is well proficient in managing and storing unstructured content in the Oracle database. Stellent Universal Content Management software gives them the required muscle to add up some additional features and capabilities for document management, digital asset management, Web content management, information rights management, records and retention management, imaging and governance, and risk and compliance management.
This acquisition comes at a time when rival IBM acquired FileNet, another content management company at$1.6 billion. There has been a sharp rise in the content management software market, where mega-buyouts is the latest trend. IBM would be integrating FileNet operations into its existing Information management software business. In another acquisition, EMC, the storage system vendor gobbled up Documentum, which developed content management software in a stock valued at $1.7 billion. Another major player in the market, and Oracles closest rival SAP is also extending its product lineup and currently has a suite of utilities products and public sector offerings. Oracle too has sketched some similar plans. The company would extend its current product lineup content management application portfolio, which includes Oracle Content database for storing and managing unstructured content.
Robert Olson, President & CEO, Stellent said " "Our leading product suite will have the dedicated resources and broad distribution networks of the largest enterprise software company in the world, which will elevate our award-winning solutions to new levels within the enterprise content management industry."
Right now the Oracle has some catching up to do. The ability to provide top-notch ECM capabilities is the need of the hour and would turn out to be a major deciding factor amongst Oracle's major rivals—SAP, IBM and Microsoft. Sample this, for past many years now SAP has had an ECM suit. IBM has been working on a platform for both structured and unstructured data for a couple of years. And with the release of Office 12 Microsoft will move into the ECM space. Analysts believe, considering the competitive environment, Stellent is a good buy for Oracle.
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