Oracle, Open Text Refresh Partnership

Under a new co-seller agreement, the two companies will jointly sell bundled software from both vendors.

Enterprise software company Oracle and enterprise content management firm Open Text have announced a new co-seller agreement, under which the companies will jointly sell bundled software from both vendors.

Although Oracle and Open Text have been partners for over a decade, the relationship has mainly been one of "benign neglect," said Ron Vangell, vice president and general manager of Open Text for the Oracle Solutions Group.

But customers at the two companies have a number of common needs, he added. "Theyre looking for the holy grail of databases," he said. "One thats fully capable of handling unstructured content, is sophisticated and has business process execution language."

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About 85 percent of Open Text customers also use Oracle, according to Vangell. Because of that, the two companies have been intent on creating more products that interoperate seamlessly across Oracle databases and Open Text ECM offerings.

In June, the two companies first began showing their renewed partnership efforts with an announcement that Open Text would offer content management on the Oracle Content Database infrastructure software.

With the new co-seller agreement, the companies are looking to serve existing customers better, but also increase the percentage of enterprises that use both Open Text and Oracle.

Open Text also released details about its road map for Oracle applications, including the ability to access information stored in Oracle Content DB, and a full records management application for corporate governance and compliance.

"Whats changed here is that the database has become enriched," said Vangell. "In the past, what vendors would do is use a database for metadata and get under the covers of whatever ERP [enterprise resource planning] they had. With what Oracle is doing with fusion middleware, we have an abstract layer that will give you access to a customer transaction with a unified, homogeneous view across the entire database."

By using the middleware layer, users can track customer transactions in a more robust way, Vangell added. For example, if a complaint is received in e-mail and references an invoice number, smart tags within the software will make the number into a hyperlink that accesses information across various databases.

The user can then do research from the e-mail without leaving the application, said Vangell. "Smart tags and hyperlinks create a holistic ERP system, and enables a self-service type of environment," he said. "It adds a whole new layer of capability."

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