CMS Watch Predicts Oracle Will Suck in 2009

Well... this is pretty negative...

CMS Watch came out with their 12 predictions for 2009, and number seven was "Oracle will fall behind in the battle for knowledge workers." Here's the relevant quote:

At one level, Oracle had a banner year in 2008: completing or consolidating numerous large acquisitions that bring in heavy streams of ever-beloved maintenance revenues. But 2009 will expose Oracle's weakness with front-office applications at a time when Microsoft, IBM, and many smaller players are fighting for the hearts and minds of knowledge workers.

Customers are already feeling indigestion, as different Oracle teams market overlapping and often incomplete solutions. For example, Oracle is struggling to combine four different enterprise portal offerings, and many customers are chafing at the financial and architectural challenges of aligning with the putative winner, Oracle WebCenter Suite (OWS). Similarly, collaboration and social software services remain divided between OWS and the new Beehive offering -- a bad situation made worse by the fact that both are really development platforms and not finished toolsets. Meanwhile, longtime Stellent UCM customers complain that Oracle is moving away from the product's Web CMS roots to emphasize heavy-duty document and records management.

Some thoughts...

First, the acquisition of BEA did really shake up Oracle's whole knowledge management / collaboration / Enterprise 2.0 strategy... and yes, there is considerable overlap in the product offerings. However, ultimately this will be a good thing, because only the best of the best will become strategic products under the "WebCenter" brand. This will take time to digest... it may or may not be "all better" by the 11g release in 2009, but I remain optimistic based on the previews I've seen... so the architecture will likely become much more simplified.

Although, I do have to agree that a lot of Oracle's offerings here are platforms, instead of complete applications -- Stellent/ECM being one exception. The WebCenter platform will never be huge, unless it has pre-packaged "Killer Apps" built on it. This is a general fact about all platforms, and is very much true here as well. There are several in the works -- collectively called "Fusion Applications" -- but I have no clue when they will be released.

Second, regarding the financial challenges, I guess I don't know what he means here... the current WebCenter bundle is a bit pricey, mainly because it's a bundle of so many different tools. Remember, WebCenter is a brand, and not just a single piece of technology. Oracle will probably figure out smaller, cheaper bundles that sell better, so I don't see this as that much of a long term problem. Maybe some folks are upset about the price of migration from older platforms to WebCenter... but nobody is forcing them to upgrade. They'll have to do a technology refresh at some point, and Oracle will continue to support and make new released of their non-strategic product lines... so I guess I'll need to hear more before I can respond.

Third, regarding existing Stellent UCM customers, Oracle is actually moving in both WCM and document/records management at the same time. The heavy-duty document and records management offerings are badly needed by many of their existing enterprise customers, so there's a lot of sales opportunity by productizing a few enterprise-level integrations. While at the same time, they spent a lot of time and energy in the next version of Site Studio (Web Content Management) including their Open WCM initiative... This will be big in 2009.

The Stellent faithful have been hearing this line for a long time, but their patience will be rewarded as soon as January.

For those who watched the December 10 customer call, you'd know that you will be able to play with this next-generation of Site Studio relatively soon. A lot of it will be released as Site Studio 10gr4 at the beginning of 2009. The rest will be released in 11g, which is slated for some time in 2009. Alan Baer will be doing a Deep Dive into Oracle Site Studio 10gr4 in January, if you want to know more.

And finally, we should note that of the dozen 2008 predictions by CMS Watch, they claim seven came true, three did not, and two are in the "maybe" pile... so take this prediction with a grain of salt. Oracle has several decent ECM products due out in 2009... so this warning could be both a wake-up call, and a self-denying prophesy.