Oracle has made two key purchases to
round out its forthcoming foray into the content world. Context
Media provides content integration and unified access features with
their content interchange platform. TripleHop, a previous
acquisition, contributes contextual search and federation to
multiple sources. This bulletin describes the products and the
effect that these acquisitions may have on the content technologies
markets.
SITUATION OVERVIEW
Information is scattered all over a typical enterprise. The problem
is not going away; it is only getting worse as rich media
collections are added to the list of media that must be managed and
accessed centrally. It is not surprising, then, that Oracle
announced on August 2, 2005, that it would acquire Context Media in
order to solve the problem of fragmented information stores.
Context Media began its life in 1999 as a content interchange
platform for the Internet, enabling content to be shared,
distributed, syndicated, and used. By 2004, it had turned its
attention to the same problem within the enterprise. Today, the
Context Media platform acts as a Web services-based oriented
architecture for content, creating a common suite of services to
connect disparate content stores, extracting metadata from file
headers for all kinds of media, and making a file available to
multiple applications. It ties the creative process to the content
access and delivery processes. The product is quick to install, and
it creates a virtual metadata repository, pulling together files in
multiple formats and repositories so that content can be found,
cataloged, searched, and reused centrally.
The company has focused on content-intense vertical industries such
as publishing, media, retail, and manufacturing. They have created
pipelines (combinations of adaptors and services) for major
databases, application servers, and content management systems. They
are particularly strong in their ability to extract metadata from
video/audio and image files. And they are standards-based, including
XML, SOAP, and JSR 170.
With this acquisition, Oracle gains the following Context Media
products:
Interchange Suite – enables organizations to access content stored in
multiple and disparate content repositories, providing a single unified view
of content no matter where it resides.
Intershare – enables enterprise users to access widely distributed
content from frequently used desktop applications.
PortalPLUS – provides a single integration gateway from an
organization’s portal to disparate content sources.
EdgeShare – streamlines the way digital content is unified, managed,
controlled, and delivered.
This is not the only recent acquisition for Oracle in the
area of unstructured information. TripleHop was acquired earlier this year by
the Oracle Search group, bringing with it advanced search and agent
technologies, as well as the ability to aggregate and distribute content from
multiple sources. TripleHop's Matchpoint technologies bring with them contextual
search, browse, query expansion, word sense disambiguation, clustering,
collaborative filtering, categorization, and rich media search for audio and
video files. TripleHop also crawls structured and unstructured information
collections and databases, underlining the new emphasis on combining data and
content access into a single system.
Contextual search is still in its early days. It uses the clues that users in an
enterprise leave as they move from one task to the next. The content of file
systems and queries can be used to act as context for a query, supplying the
reason behind why a query is being launched, and helping to resolve the
ambiguity of the words in it.
FUTURE OUTLOOK
What does this mean
for Oracle? Certainly, the Context Media acquisition is a leg up for Oracle's
soon-to-be-released content management platform, Oracle Content Services.
Federation of multiple non-Oracle repositories was not part of the original
Oracle content management story. But the problem of scattered repositories is
not going to evaporate. The fact is that content and digital asset management
applications are often so central to the workings of innumerable business
processes that retooling and unifying the actual applications is simply
impractical. At least in the short term. With this acquisition, Oracle is
acquiring federation and aggregation technology that is proven and robust.
Oracle's content management and search releases this fall may change the content
management market landscape. Billed as "Content Management for the rest of us",
the announcement in late 2004 described a tool-rich environment that is
user-focused: combining collaboration tools and search with user interaction
models that are task-based. Added to the strong search and content management
applications that Oracle developed itself, the TripleHop and Context Media
acquisitions should give Oracle all the pieces it needs to make its next content
management and search engine releases run ahead of the pack. The agent
technologies from TripleHop could enable Oracle to create an agent-based layer
that would support a very advanced user interaction model that would be well
ahead of its time. Today, the Oracle 10g products for collaboration, portal,
content management, business intelligence, and search are being integrated to
become Oracle's "Unified Workplace." Once the new acquisitions are added and the
agent layer is developed, this could well become the first true Enterprise
Workplace, as defined by IDC.
All of these features add up to the next generation of information management,
access, and delivery.
