Open Text is embedding its enterprise content management solutions deeper into Oracle database and middleware technology, with the two companies agree to closer cooperation in the ECM marketplace.

The agreement does not extended as far as the reseller relationship Open Text has with SAP, but the company is hopeful that too will come in time.

Lubor Ptacek, Vice President, Product Marketing at Open Text, said, “The agreement with Oracle will allow us to embrace, repurpose and embed in our technology portions of the Oracle stack, specifically the database. We already have in place a number of Oracle specific solutions for areas such as accounts payable, but we would like to go deeper, so we need to allow customers to leverage whatever investment they already have in the Oracle infrastructure.

“We have a lot of Oracle customers who use us for the accounts payable operation, whether for Oracle E-business, JD Edwards or PeopleSoft. In those accounts we would like to grow our footprint because AP automation is not an enterprise-wide application. We’d like to do a little more with those customers and we see this agreement as the right step towards that.”

Rich Buchheim, Vice President of Open Text's Oracle Solutions Group, said the agreement would enhance the company’s ability to build solutions for compliance, archiving and ediscovery for Oracle customers.

Before joining Open Text, Buchheim spent seven years at Oracle where he was deeply involved with the purchase of Stellant.

“There were capabilities to use the Oracle database for content and for metadata, for both structured and unstructured data, but most companies chose to keep the content external in the file system.

“The technology we are licensing from Oracle has been optimised over 10 years to utilise the Oracle database as the full repository, bringing together the structured and unstructured data in the database. The technology is now available to us to expand the way we use the Oracle database

“Certainly the Stellant technology we acquired while I was at Oracle is quite capable, but Oracle’s strategic direction has focused more on building content management into the fusion middleware stack, so it can be used by the applications Oracle builds, particularly the business applications. And also so it can be used by partners to build deeper content management solutions,” he said.

“Because we are bringing much more of the Oracle stack to the customer Oracle sees this from a business standpoint as a much more interesting relationship. When we sell one of these solutions into an Oracle account its great for us and its also great for Oracle.”