Oracle Eyes Regulatory Compliance with Content-Management Acquisition

As reported by the Associated Press, Oracle Corporation agreed today to acquire Stellent Inc., a provider of document-management software, for $13.50 per share in cash, or a total of about $440 million The acquisition price represented a 27% premium on Stellent’s shares, which ended the day at $10.62.

Said Thomas Kurian, Oracle senior vice president:

The amount of electronic content, unstructured data, and documents is growing very rapidly, and organizations are seeking advanced and automated content- and process-management solutions to manage this information to meet regulatory requirements. Stellent’s enterprise content-management solutions enable a variety of people within an organization to create, capture, store, manage, publish, view, search and archive all types of documents across their entire lifecycle.

It’s an acquisition that dovetails with Oracle’s database franchise and its growing stable of enterprise applications. As noted by the Wall Street Journal, Oracle has spent more than $20 billion acquiring business-applications software companies, including PeopleSoft and Siebel Systems, during the past two years.

Stellent has a number of OEM and technology partners, and it will be interesting to see how Oracle deals with those relationships.

Might Red Hat Acquire Ingres?

Dan Lyons writes the following on his blog regarding a potential acquisition of Ingres by Red Hat Inc.:

They need a database to fill out their stack. MySQL presents problems for various reasons — one of which is that Larry owns InnoDB, the company that makes the MySQL database engine. Ingres on the other hand is tried and true technology, fully owned by Ingres and not dependent on some weird little company in Finland for a crucial part of its system. And Ingres has a serious management team, something Red Hat desperately needs. Are they talking already? If not, they should be.

With Oracle putting the squeeze on its Linux support margins, Red Hat might consider an acquisition of an open-source database vendor — and Ingres qualifies. We’ll have to see what transpires.

Microsoft Might Reconsider Doing Business in China

Although the prospect remains unlikely, a senior Microsoft executive says the software giant might have to reconsider doing business in China if "if the persecuting of bloggers reaches a point that it’s unacceptable to do business there."

Said Fred Tipson, senior policy counsel for Microsoft:

Things are getting bad… and perhaps we have to look again at our presence there.

We have to decide if the persecuting of bloggers reaches a point that it’s unacceptable to do business there."

We try to define those levels and the trends are not good there at the moment. It’s a moving target.

Tipson was speaking earlier this week at the Internet Governance Forum in Athens. On the same day he made the above remarks, he took part in debate on "openness" in which Microsoft and Cisco, another panel participant, were singled out for accusations from some delegates that the companies were not doing all they could to enable freedom of expression.

Microsoft might also be concerned about China’s software piracy, which continues to be a major problem for the Redmond giant and other purveyors of intellectual property.