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Open Text targets customers of Oracle

Waterloo-based Open Text Corp. has broadened its partnership with Oracle Corp., hopingย to widen its customer base for information governance offerings by targeting organizations using Oracle technologies.

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Open Textโ€™s long-standing relationship with the Redwood Shores, Calif.-based vendor has been to resell and use technologies like the database and SOA suite. But it has now also obtained a technology and distribution licence for Oracleโ€™s Universal Online Archive Content Management SDK, allowing it to embed Oracle technology in Open Text products.

โ€œThe solutions are delivered in environments that Oracle customers either already have or are familiar with and know how to use, and basically itโ€™s the ecosystem they prefer,โ€ said Rich Buchheim, vice-president of Open Textโ€™s Oracle solutions group.

Specifically, Open Textโ€™s content management offerings can take advantage of the enterprise content repository that is Oracle Database 11g to capture large amounts of data.

Buchheim, who himself previously worked for Oracle, said Open Text is hoping to leverage the single-vendor stack approach that Oracle touts. โ€œAnd the more of that that a content management solution can uptake the better that fits into the Oracle ecosystem and the more interesting it is for Oracle,โ€ said Buchheim.

But Open Text already has a content repository of its own with an established install base. The goal is not for the Oracle partnership to replace what Open Text already has; instead itโ€™s for the Oracle customer โ€œto be able to play wellโ€ with Open Text offerings, said Lubor Ptacek, vice-president of product marketing with Open Text. โ€œWe have no intent to give that up,โ€ said Ptacek.

Ptacek said the partnership is valuable because Oracle doesnโ€™t having offerings in the information governance space. But he didnโ€™t want to speculate on what might happen if Oracle decides to put out its own offerings or acquire a vendor in that market. โ€œIt depends at that point if there is a joint value proposition possible,โ€ said Ptacek.

Besides with Oracle, Open Text has similar partnerships with Microsoft Corp. and SAP AG. The situation isย similar toย Open Textโ€™s partnership with Microsoft, said Ptacek. While SharePoint has content management capabilities, โ€œit doesnโ€™t mean we donโ€™t have a joint value proposition. Au contraire, we actually added a lot of value to SharePoint deployments,โ€ said Ptacek.

Follow Kathleen Lau on Twitter:ย @KathleenLau

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