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Common Sense Advisory Blogs
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Oracle Buys Stellent for ECM Product Line
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Stellent's Universal Content Management product line offers 5 key application modules together on one platform and with one user interface: web content management, document management, collaboration, records management, and digital asset management. Stellent's ECM solution also provides productized integrations for ERP and other applications, a critical component for large enterprises.
A full-featured system designed for very large organizations, Stellent provides a framework for managing hundreds or even thousands of related web sites. Stellent's transformational software, Outside In Technology (née Inso), lets enterprise content aggregators identify, convert, and view over 390 unstructured file formats. The DAM system performs auto-transformation actions according to business rules for ingested items, like re-encoding video and audio files for multi-channel delivery.
Unfortunately, the Stellent system offers limited built-in support for global content management. For instance, it does not ship with pre-defined attributes for language, locale, and source/target relationships. Several pre-built translation workflows are available, but only if a customer knows to request them. Since the company acknowledges that even in the U.S. "every large company has multilingual content," we find it puzzling that Stellent ignored the essential checklist items of global process support for out-of-the-box attributes, workflows, and translation technology integration.
We think that success in the U.S. market had lulled this company to sleep. The success of Documentum, FileNet, and Hummingbird in both Europe and Asia should have already prodded Stellent into action, but had not -- as of last year, just 17% of its revenue came from outside North America versus a third or more of revenue for some of its competitors. This year the company noted it had "generated growth in emerging markets" and "strengthened our international operations...." but without more detail, such boilerplate items sound suspiciously like lip service.
With the acquisition by Oracle -- a global segment leader and localization powerhouse, but a non-player in content management -- it will be interesting to follow whether product-level globalization support gets a revamp. It should also be intriguing to see how this new ECM component will change the strategies of other CMS providers that built their software on Oracle's database or application server.
For very large deployments, commitment to supporting a client's international operations is an important criterion for platform selection, something that Oracle itself is well aware of. We expect to see greater multi-regional process support, enhanced features for global content handling, and additional localization of the product interfaces.
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