Oracle has been named to the leaders quadrant for Web Content Management (WCM) by Gartner, which states the 2007 purchase of Stellent and integration of its excellent WCM capabilities into the Oracle Fusion Middleware strategy was a wise one.

The Oracle WCM is a component of Oracle Universal Content Management, which is a unified enterprise content management platform for leveraging document management, Web content management, digital asset management, and records retention functionality to build and complement business applications. Users can view, collaborate on or retire content to help ensure all accessible distributed or published information is secure, accurate, and up-to-date.

Gartner's assessment of Oracle's WCM:

Strengths

• Its strength and differentiation lies in its ability to integrate Universal Content Management (UCM) well with its own suite of business applications through "productized" integrations and its Application Integration Architecture (AIA) strategy. In addition, its adoption of service-oriented architecture (SOA) promotes easier integration with third-party components through a standardized interface.

• Oracle is well-positioned to exploit some of the key trends in the WCM market. These are likely to include tighter integrations with its recommendation engine and other technologies, such as its CRM business application. One important trend is the requirement for greater usability, and Oracle has built on the ease of use that helped drive the original success of Stellent. This extends beyond content authoring to template development, workflow design, multichannel delivery and multisite management.

Cautions

• Oracle remains largely technology focused with its WCM strategy and needs to exploit its potential better to produce both horizontal WCM solutions, such as for marketing, and WCM CEVAs for individual market sectors.

• The economic climate has introduced a degree of caution among prospects faced with potential license fees and implementation costs from Oracle that are much higher than those of many of the best-of-breed offerings in the market. Given that the business departments choosing the WCM offering are often those faced simultaneously with budget cuts, Oracle is likely to be excluded from shortlists where a more comprehensive enterprise strategy is not a high priority in the relevant business case.

In its assessment, Gartner takes into account a vendor's current product offerings and overall strategies, as well as their future initiatives and product road maps. It also factors in how well a vendor is driving market changes, or at least adapting to changing market requirements.

Gartner defines its leaders as ones that can, and should, drive market transformation. To be categorized as a leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant, a vendor must have one of the highest combined scores for Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision. In the context of content management, they also must possess strong channel partners, a presence in multiple regions, consistent financial performance, broad platform support and good customer support. In addition, they dominate in one or more technologies or vertical markets. Leaders are "environmentally aware" of the solution "ecosystem" into which their own offerings need to fit. Leaders can: demonstrate enterprise deployments; offer integration with other business applications and content repositories; incorporate Web 2.0 and XML capabilities; and provide a vertical-process or horizontal-solution focus.

"We believe our position in the Leaders Quadrant is a reflection of our commitment to usability and integrating Web content management with business applications," said Andy MacMillan, vice president, Product Management, Oracle, "whether they are components of Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Applications or third-party technologies."

More Information

Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management - Gartner report

Oracle Universal Content Management

Oracle Web Content Management [...read more...]

		fullsource
Print Email Current Profile Archive Blog Generate newsletter