Oracle / Sun. Pass me another company, Burp !

20th April 2009, Oracle looks poised to acquire Sun Microsystems, pending Sun stockholder and other regulatory approvals, see Sun release here.

Wow pass me another company, burp ! The initial thoughts are that both companies will operate independently, yeah right !

Over time we will see the parent push culture and direction into the Sun camp. How will this all play out?

The acquisition gives Oracle a commanding position to battle up against the likes of IBM from the app to the bare metal, in theory a nice end to end story.

Acquiring the JAVA rights is a key software positioning that should not be underestimated as Oracle will strengthen its middleware play in in the marketplace. It also gives a strong Microsoft compete story in the application development space and office applications. But the question is how well the acquisition and the integration goes. Will the burp be passing gas or will a deeper organisational indigestion set in. I have not crystal ball, so let’s see how this pans out.

 

Going live with Windows Live Writer

The previous blog entry “Where have all the vendors gone” was produced and published using Microsoft Live Writer. I must say the whole process was a delight. I was using the 2009 version of the Live Writer product.

Shown above is a direct ALT-PrtScrn and Paste into the blog entry from the Help | About Windows Live Writer menu. This is not mind blowing, I agree, but it really effective and gets across the ease of use that I have found with the product.

The hyperlink at the top of this post was placed there one click, select previous post option,  fast and painless.

This version is light years ahead of the previous versions of live writer that I have used, where I have struggled to get the content and images in the right place for the template that I was using. But now I have been able to download the template, so that I get a preview of the actual layout of the blog entry, even before I go near the web, fantastic.

Setup was easy and getting the templates was as simple as pointing to the blog and enter my logon details. Then I was asked if I wanted the theme downloaded and away we went, simple and easy are the words that spring to mind. I will be giving the writer a bit more of a squeeze in the coming weeks.

If you are interested to get a look at the software go Live Writer

Where have all the vendors gone

Where have all the vendors gone long time passing, where have all the vendors gone, long time ago.  Gone in acquisitions, everyone…….. (think where have all the flowers gone).

Well over the last three years we have certainly seen the share of M&A activity in the ECM space with top right hand names such as Hummingbird, FileNet and Stellent all going the way of acquisition. Here is a non definitive list of some of the acquisitions that have happened 2006 to 2009.

Date	Company / Product	Acquired by
Jul 2006	Hummingbird	OpenText
Aug 2006	FileNet	IBM
Nov 2006	Stellent	Oracle
Oct 2007	Meridio	Autonomy
Jan 2008	FAST	Microsoft
Mar 2008	Tower Software	HP
Jan 2009	Interwoven	Autonomy

 

This table in itself makes for interesting reading and we must ask what about the likes of Vignette ? how are they going to fair in this rough and tumble year?

CMIS live example

Three ECM vendors and the AIIM organisation have collaborated together to design and deploy a live example of federated search utilising the Content Management Integration Standard (CMIS). This is being demonstrated at the AIIM Conference in Philadelphia in the US.

This example is also available on the web at this location:

http://www.aiim-iecm.org/CMISDemoE/Default.aspx


This is primarily a federated search and retrieve implementation of CMIS over Documentum, Nuxeo and Alfresco repositories. You can search across the repositories and then retrieve the document from your browser.

While some may say this is not stunning, this is a great test model of the standard (not yet ratified) in action. There are many organisations, especially the large ones that have multiple vendor products and therefore multiple repositories in place. The possibility of bringing these together in a federated way is an exciting possibility.