Oracle News & Articles

This week, Autonomy -- under the spectre of what might happen to its planned acquisition by HP -- announces several new products, and spats about whether Oracle was really its first choice for a partner, plus we have surveys and reports. Boy, do we have surveys and reports.

I was fortunate enough to attend a partner conference at Oracle’s headquarters in Redwood Shores, California, just prior to the announcement of the rebranding WebCenter product launch. Our meeting focused on Oracle’s vision purpose behind the rebranding and grouping of their portal, content management, web content management and enterprise social applications. During the meeting, we were presented with Oracle’s already published pending acquisition of FatWire (which has since been re-branded to WebCenter Sites).

There were a number of new releases in the document management space this week. LibreOffice has announced the release of a public beta of its extension and template repositories, Google Docs gets synced with PCs, KnowledgeTree Ships with DM tools, V1 integrates with Oracle E-Business Suite and Toshiba extends its print services.

V1 document management landed in the US from Britain two years ago. Since then it has expanded in all directions, developing its re-seller channel and partners, including Oracle. This week, it has just announced that it is building on the Oracle connection and providing integrated document management to Oracle’s E-Business Suite.

Microsoft is working hard on its upcoming Windows 8 operating system, and will be sharing pre-release builds in time for its BUILD conference. In a bit to strike up more public interest, the Windows 8 development team has given some sneak peeks into the latest Windows Explorer interface. The main highlight: ribbons.

Oracle has barged its way into the headlines several times over the last year with news of its cloud-based moves, customer experience aptitude and, of course, the purchase of FatWire. If you're wondering what kind of effect these plays will have on the company's technology and your business, this year's OpenWorld conference in San Francisco is not to be missed. 

Dreamforce starts today… and it feels like Groundhog Day. Not the groundhog that tells the weather, but groundhog in the way things keep repeating themselves. The repetition this time is in the shape of Microsoft’s offer of rebates of US$ 150-per-seat for customers who subscribe to Dynamics CRM online.

In recent months, the Facebook team has been on a quest to pack more information into the homepage. The latest composition removes the Most Recent tab from the news feed and replaces it with a real-time activity feed inside the Chat sidebar, slamming users with more information whether they like it or not. 

As digital advertising grows to an estimated US$ 72 billion market in 2011 measuring, managing and optimizing this spend has become a priority for Adobe. A reorganization announced today puts Brad Rencher, currently in charge of Adobe's Omniture business unit, out front in this domain and overseeing the company's customer experience management (CXM) solutions, largely got via the Day Software acquisition.

Since Oracle announced that it was buying web experience management vendor FatWire (news, site), there has been a lot of speculation as to what the company might do with the product set. Yesterday, Andy MacMillan, VP of Product Management for Enterprise 2.0 at Oracle, outlined the roadmap for Fatwire and explained how Oracle will make sense of things under the Oracle WebCenter moniker.

Oracle (news, site) may be trying to strengthen its position in the highly competitive customer relationship management (CRM) market. The company announced that it is acquiring InQuira, creators of analytics and knowledge management offerings for CRM.

It’s taken a couple of weeks to get it, but Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for the GRC space is finally out. Leaving aside the list of vendors that made it into the "'Leaders' quadrant," Gartner says that over the course of this year, the market shifted from a tactical focus on regulatory compliance to a wider focus on enterprise risk management.

With the release of Office 365 and all Microsoft’s talk about the cloud and its potential, it was striking that many of the cloud migration tools for MS cloud products recently have been from third-party vendors. However, Microsoft has announced the release of Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 6.0 that appears to be redressing that balance.

With companies such as IBM and Oracle now targeting the Big Data space, it seemed like Microsoft had been dragging its heels. Not so. Duriing the week at its Research Faculty Summit in Redmond, it announced a set of tools and services built around the Azure platform that will redress the balance.

The Forrester Wave: Web Content Management for Online Customer Experience (CXM) has just arrived and it reads like a who's who of web content management. Seems there are few WCM vendors who don't make some attempt to support the delivery of a complete online customer experience, but most still have a lot of work to do. Who leads and who challenges? Read on.