Oracle Public Cloud

Oracle is strengthening Public Cloud via RightNow

Oracle has aquired one more company which made 7 acquisitions in current year till now. Now people are not surprised with Oracle acquisitions. This time it has acquired "RightNow" – listed on NASDAQ – for $43 per share or roughly $1.5 billion net of RightNow’s cash and debt. With the acquisition, Oracle is adding a robust cloud-based customer service offering to its own Public Cloud solution.

RightNow is a software as a service company that focuses on customer service via call centers and self-service options via the Web and social networks. That customer service focus is aimed at the heart of Salesforce.com.

Its products are used by nearly 2,000 organizations across the globe, the company says.

Founded in 1997, RightNow went public in 2004. The company boasted a market cap of $1.2 billion at market close last week.

The acquisition by Oracle is expected to close later this year or in early 2012. As usual, the transaction is subject to a number of things, including RightNow stockholder approval, regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.

Thomas Kurian, executive vice president of Oracle Development, said in a statement that Oracle is “moving aggressively to offer customers a full range of Cloud Solutions including sales force automation, human resources, talent management, social networking, databases and Java as part of the Oracle Public Cloud.”

That quote is basically shorthand for “Oracle is going cloud shopping.”

Oracle has closed 6 acquisitions this year. While its takeovers of RightNow and Endeca are pending, the company has completed the purchases of Datanomic, FatWire, Inquira, select intellectual property assets of Ndevr, Ksplice and Pillar Data Systems in 2011 alone.

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[hide] Mahesh [/hide]

Oracle WebCenter Suite

Oracle WebCenter Suite 

The heading of the blog might not be appealing as they are new names  of the product opted by oracle after important acquisitions.

In this fast moving world, if you don’t read technical blogs and web articles continuously then you would feel alone unless somebody explains you what had happened recently. In my case, I had worked on Oracle Portal two years back and I was well aware of the product. Recently, we had an enhancement to integrate our application with portal. I was stuck with something and tried to search on Google or Bing. I got my answer in OTN but I saw a new word i.e. ‘WebCenter Portal’ nearly in all search results. I had noticed but didn’t give time to explore it.

Second instance happened when Oracle acquired Stellent and FatWire. Stellent CMS product named ‘Universal Content System’ (UCM) was branded as ‘Oracle UCM’. by Oracle. We all were well aware of new branding as every forum and document had replaced Stellent UCM by Oracle UCM. Suddenly, Oracle acquired FatWire which lead to re-brand Oracle UCM as WebCenter sites. This made a confusion for users and developers. 

I was reading Oracle articles and recent announcements in Oracle Open World. I found very good information on WebCenter suite. Oracle should be considered a big time competitor to IBM and Microsoft in the Portal, Content Management and Social spaces. The out of the box integration features that Oracle provides across all of its product line, not just WebCenter is fantastic. 

Here is brief summary of products that Oracle has in WebCenter suite which cover ECM, WCM, Portal and Social. 

1. WebCenter Portal – A powerful combination of the best features from Oracle, BEA,  and Sun portals. This used to be called Web Center Spaces.

2.  WebCenter Sites – The FatWire Web Content Management system.

3.  WebCenter Content – The ECM product based on Stellent.

4.  WebCenter Connect – Also known as Web Center Social.

Oracle WebCenter suite = Oracle WebCenter Portal + Oracle WebCenter Sites + Oracle WebCenter Content + Oracle WebCenter Connect

Above diagram also shows the same.

Oracle WebCenter Content

 Oracle WebCenter Content

From last few months I am working on WebCenter Content (formally Oracle UCM, Stellent). Now you could guess why I was not able to post new blogs. I like CMS technology but lack of documentation freaks out sometimes. There were small issues which took many hours or week, searching on Google returned the same documents which I already referred.

Thanks to Kyle Hatlestad's, Bex huff's and others' blogs which have guided me and saved my life. I have observed the these guys give onle brief idea on new topic. Since Oracle has started using Jdeveloper as a coding tool for WebCentre Content with Site studio patch, there is a major shift in coding. I usually find examples and snippet for older version of coding which was frustrating in beginning.

How can I miss Oracle Technology Network (OTN), this is the platform where we can cry and post our issues & problems. Thanks to Srinath Menon who responds prominently on our issues. But.... there are many unanswered questions which is big issue for the experts in this field.