Oracle set to unleash Tsunami on ECM market

Oracle's arrival in the enterprise content management market next week, will release a tidal wave that could engulf established structured and unstructured data players alike, industry experts have predicted.

The database giant is set to announce its major ECM initiative, code-named Tsunami, at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is expected to say that the new technology represents a significant rethinking of the traditional role of software and information services for the company.

Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Ovum vice president Software and IT Services, said: "Building on its strengths in structured data management, Oracle hopes to take a major portion of the emerging unstructured data management (UDM) market, of which ECM is a large part."

Tsunami is expected to comprise a major upgrade to Oracle's existing Collaboration Suite, creating an ECM system with the ability to scale up to tens and potentially hundreds of thousands of seats.

According to Pelz-Sharpe, the database giant's move is well-timed, given the success of Microsoft's SharePoint initiative, which has enjoyed rapid gains in the low and mid market with over 20 million seats currently deployed.

"The market opportunity for Oracle is large, for in less than two years Microsoft with the release of SharePoint has come to dominate the low and mid market for UDM, with cumulatively more seats deployed globally than all the other ECM vendors combined," observed Pelz-Sharpe. "Oracle hopes to emulate this success in larger enterprise deployments - as such, Tsunami can be seen as SharePoint on Steroids."

Ovum believes that Oracle's entry into this market will almost certainly have major repercussions for both existing ECM niche vendors - such as FileNet, OpenText and EMC/Documentum - and, more significantly, also for structured data vendors such as IBM, Microsoft and Sybase.

The analyst firm notes that the move will help Oracle remain competitive with Microsoft in its core data management business as both firms begin to focus more closely on UDM.

Pelz-Sharpe said: "What needs to be noted is that IBM and Microsoft are already deeply involved in UDM. Microsoft has seen great early success with SharePoint and IBM has legacy business in document management. Interestingly, Oracle has taken the SharePoint model rather than attempt to emulate IBM's document management heritage. This is because Oracle is fundamentally a database company and believes that all data should be stored in the database."

"This is an argument that was difficult to defend five years ago, but with technology advances today it stands up more vigorously to defence. It will be delivering UDM as infrastructure, and attempting to provide truly enterprise-wide deployments, rather than high-end departmental-specific installations."

See also:

Oracle plots ECM push

Oracle is expected to set out its enterprise content management plans this week  06 Dec 2004

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