Another one bites the dust - ECM Consolidation Juggernaut continues

Oracle announced its bid for acquiring Stellent yesterday - most people were expecting Oracle to be the likely suitor for Filenet a couple of months ago. Stellent is a poor cousin to Filenet - but then Oracle has a need to fill the ECM gap in their product portfolio and Stellent may just do that.

What it doesn't bring to Oracle is the strong business process management / workflow platform that they would have got from Filenet. But I guess they could make an interesting play combining their BPEL Server (the one they acquired from Collaxa and is now renamed to be part of their Fusion middleware) with Stellent's ECM.

Stellent itself was mostly a web content management company till a few years back when they acquired Optika - a Filenet wannabe with strong Imaging and Workflow solutions. It will be interesting how this mix and match portfolio will be integrated into Oracle's offerings.

I guess now that Oracle has played its hand, the speculation moves on the next big acquisition - HP and Microsoft are the likely ones to make such an announcement. My bet is on HP acquiring either Opentext, Interwoven or Vignette within the next quarter.

technorati tags: ecm, consolidation, acquisition, document+management, imaging, workflow, bpm, bpel, oracle, stellent, hp, opentext, microsoft, vignette, interwoven