Time for Oracle to show its hand in ECM

Oracle's enterprise content management has been a long time a-coming but, with the Stellent acquisiiton done and a new release of Universal Records Management under the famous red logo, the pieces are finally falling into place.

I'm still a little puzzled over where Orac;e's organic efforts have ended up. The company was leaking plenty of information about a  move into ECM well before the Stellent announcement with the project originally dubbed Tsunami, but never made a big splash into the sector. The acquisition of Stellent was something of a surprise given how much work Oracle had done internally, and also because of the releatively small scale of the purchase.

Now, it's time for Oracle to front up in ECM and do a better job than it has done so far in explaining where it sits against the likes of EMC-Documentum, IBM-FileNet and Open Text. So far, the talk has been of baking in ECM into Oracle's Fusion middleware. Sage heads will doubtless nod along but to me this is as clear as gravy. Sure, it makes sense that Oracle's ECM tools hook up with other programs from the vendor but information managers need a better perspective on how Oracle will support the product on platforms that are rivals to Oracle in other sectors.

They also need to hear about product development plans, service and support, Oracle's view on emerging standards, and all the other components that make the ECM world go round.

For some time now, Oracle  has spent more time acquiring than explaining. Its desire for scale is understandable at a time when supplier rationalisation is on many IT departments' agendas but the remarkable merger-and-acquisition rip the firm has pursued needs to be backed up with a little more beef.

This is particulalry the case with ECM and not just because this is virgin turf for Larry Ellison's company. Some watchers will have you belive that the sector is just another bunch of code to be folded into the enterprise software broth. It's not. Those who work most closely with ECM tools are often not techies but people with long experience of archiving and librarian skills. These are people who value a close relationship with the supplier more closely than users of most other elements.

They don't need hand-holding or puppy love as some vendors seem to think, but they do want to feel they have the attention of their supplier. Oracle needs to recognise that if it is seriously seeking to conquer another enterprise kingdom.