When I was talking yesterday with Rich Buchheim, Oracle's Senior Director of Product Management, Content Products and Strategy, he made an interesting point. "We view Content DB as the underpinning for all content in the enterprise -- not only content currently outside of document management systems, but even the content within those systems. Open Text is reworking their software to access documents stored in Content DB, so it's conceivable that a company will eventually get all of its content living in Content DB, no matter which content management repository UI the users work with."
This brought me up short, since I'd certainly been thinking of Content DB as a play for content outside of the usual suspects -- Documentum, Interwoven, Stellent, Vignette -- but clearly Rich has a grander vision. Whether Oracle is the vendor that can get everyone to do that is an open question, but I do think some form of ubiquitous content infrastructure is where the market is heading.
It's a bit ironic that Microsoft had the vision early, circa 1995 with Cairo and then WinFS, but it's Oracle that has beat them to the punch.
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