The challenges pertaining to unstructured data are growing at an alarming rate. It is very difficult to find and access the content, store the data in a secured way, deal with multiple web content and maintain compliance standards. Near about 42% of the transactions in enterprises are paper based. The market for enterprise content management (ECM) is the next big thing not only in India but across the globe.

According to IDC, the content management market in Asia Pacific will enjoy a 5-year CAGR of 10.8% to reach $385 million by 2011. In order to be a part of this boom, Oracle has become aggressive about the Indian market with it's Stellent acquisition. Oracle acquired Stellent in December 2006.

Says Bill Kearney, general manager, ECM, APAC, Fusion Middleware Sales, Oracle, “It is high time that enterprises thought about developing a strategy for content management. A content management solution will not only help them reduce their cost of operation but will deliver a secure, unified architecture for managing documents, files, web content and digital assets.”

With the acquisition of Stellent, the customers will be able to integrate the ECM applications with their existing infrastructure and Stellent customers will be able to scale much beyond ECM. The integrated Enterprise Content Management Suite includes Oracle Universal Content Management, Oracle Universal Records Management and Oracle Imaging and Process Management. Oracle has integrated Stellent products with its Fusion Middleware offerings in order to broaden the product portfolio.

Oracle is planning to leverage and enable its product families for eGovernance initiatives like citizen services in India. The company is also targeting the emerging BFSI and ITES sectors in India to push its content management products.

According to Kearney, “With the growth of Web 2.0 applications, the market for ECM products will definitely increase. Enterprises will also be able to offer more efficiently various services to their customers with ECM at the back end of their operations.”

Enterprises looking for compliance along with content management can go for Oracle Universal Content Management and Oracle Universal Records Management as these solutions are coming up with various compliance standards such as WSRP 2.0 and services standards BPEL, JCR 1.0, JSR 116 and JSR 301.