Trend tracker: Oracle

By Chris Harris-Jones, research director, information management, Ovum

Oracle is perhaps not a KM vendor in the traditional sense of the specialist niche KM technologies. The organisation is, however, offering an ever increasing level of functionality that is appropriate to, and desirable for, KM. The technology core of any knowledge-management programme needs to be the ability for everyone to create, store, find, manage and retrieve information in a single complete, consistent and secure environment. Knowledge workers also need to be able to work together effectively through tools such as collaborative workspaces, e-mail, instant messaging, discussion threading and screen sharing.

Oracle has provided many of the appropriate collaboration functions for some time through the Oracle Collaboration Suite (OCS). This can be delivered through the Oracle portal (as well as by various other routes) and provides a web-based user interface, e-mail functions, whiteboarding, screen sharing and a range of other collaboration functions.

Then, at OpenWorld in December 2004, Oracle made a major announcement about the imminent release of its content-management system, Oracle Files, confirming rumours circulating in the IT press in the last quarter of 2004.

The product will become available in the first half of 2005 and will offer many more functions than in the past – previous versions of Oracle Files have been relatively basic, although the software has also never been pushed very much by Oracle. Although the full details are not yet available, it is likely that the 2005 release will offer typical CM functions such as file management and sharing, document-lifecycle management, records management and some level of workflow. This means that Oracle will be able to offer its OCS underpinned by a basic, but highly scalable, content-management system.

The most significant elements of this offering are the scope of the functionality, its scalability and its anticipated low cost per seat. Most people don’t actually need the massively complex content-management systems that are currently on offer from the leading content-management vendors. Instead, all most people want is to be able to search for content and have it controlled with basic library services such as check-in/check-out and version control. And it all needs to be immediately available to everyone across the whole organisation. The current version of Oracle Files supports tens of thousands of users at Oracle Corporation, demonstrating the scalability that it has to offer.

While much of the functionality Oracle is delivering is not particularly new, Oracle touts inherent scalability, low cost and ease of use as significant differentiators. This is a major step for Oracle towards delivering a comprehensive infrastructure for knowledge management. The announcement does not mean that Oracle will suddenly become a leader in KM technology. It does mean, though, that there is another contender on the block joining companies like IBM, Microsoft and Open Text. As Oracle already has a huge installed base of customers worldwide, the smaller vendors in this space need to take careful note of this development.