Oracle Corp. has made several recent announcements I think are of interest to anyone considering or pursuing BPM, business analytics (BA), business intelligence (BI), and/or related initiatives. These announcements should be of even more interest to anyone pursuing or considering such initiatives at an enterprise using or considering any Oracle solutions, including those it has acquired during the past few months and years. (The company is one of the only leading IT vendors of which I am aware that devotes a dedicated section of its Web sites to so-called "Strategic Acquisitions.")
As reported by ebizQ here, Oracle recently announced an ambitious road map focused on enterprise content/intellectual property (IP) management. As a significant step down the road described by said map, Oracle announced just yesterday Oracle Universal Content Management 10g Release 3, " a feature-rich, hot-pluggable ECM platform that helps organizations effectively capture, store, manage, find, publish and retain unstructured content, while easily fitting into heterogeneous infrastructures," according to Oracle. Since most of that content and IP resides in corporate databases, many if not most of which are overseen by Oracle software, this focus makes sense for Oracle, and should make sense for a number of Oracle customers as well. (The company bought content management solution provider Stellent last year; yesterday's announcement is its first major ECM product release since that acquisition.)
Separately, Oracle also announced the general availability of its Siebel CRM On Demand Integration Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite. This unwieldy name describes a solution that integrates Siebel CRM On Demand, Oracle's subscription-based, software-as-a-service (SaaS) CRM solution, with the back-office Oracle E-Business Suite. (At $30,000 per processor, the solution may not displace many Salesforce.com deployments, but should deliver value to enterprises seeking to extend the value of their incumbent Siebel CRM On Demand and/or Oracle E-Business Suite implementations.)
This announcement follows by five days the debut of Oracle Financial Services Profitability Analytics. This is effectively a pre-built integration of Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition 10g Release 3 with Oracle Financial Services Applications (OFSA). The result is a business intelligence (BI) application "that delivers actionable insight to employees, helping them improve customer service and drive new levels of profitability [while helping] organizations reduce total IT cost and complexity." A tall order, but one that eliminates the need for enterprises to build their own integrations between the two offerings, according to Oracle.
And both of these announcements follow and build upon the Oracle Application and Integration Architecture the company announced in mid-April. The goal of that initiative is to ease and speed integrations of Oracle and non-Oracle solutions, via a common object model and a platform compliant with the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), a widely used business process modeling language.
What's it all mean? Well, for companies reliant upon Oracle technologies, especially Oracle Fusion middleware, these announcements are good news for any process-focused initiatives under way or under consideration. Whether you and your enterprise are starting with a focus on application integration, CRM, or ECM, Oracle appears to have a path laid out that links your initiative to its databases via process-enabled, standards-compliant integration techniques. At least in theory. Oracle has its critics and detractors, even among its customers. But no one can say the company doesn't have strategies and plans to add value to (and generate additional revenues from) investments in its database solutions. Got opinions about Oracle and its strategies for support of BPM, BI, and related initiatives? Please share them, and I'll share and comment upon the most interesting and provocative ones I receive.
Michael Dortch has been an analyst, 'information entrepreneur,' speaker, and writer about IT and 'the real world" for the past 30 years. After almost 10 years at the Robert Frances Group (RFG), Michael begins a new position with Aberdeen Group in September.
Dennis Byron is an analyst with ebizQ, focusing on Open Source Software as well as Business Process Management technologies.
