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The latest target for serial acquirer Oracle is web experience management vendor FatWire Software. Oracle has entered into an agreement with the company and expects the deal to close in mid 2011, subject to the usual closing conditions.
Although the purchase price was not revealed, this will be a small purchase by Oracle’s standards. FatWire has a customer base of 500 across several vertical markets. UK customers include Cooperative Financial Services/Smile, Birmingham City Council, and the Metropolitan Police; Barclays, BestBuy, Santander, and Cable & Wireless are some of the international names in FatWire’s client list.
The significance of the proposed deal lies in where it fits within the Oracle portfolio and what that adds to the direction Oracle is taking its CRM applications in. FatWire operates in the rapidly advancing customer experience area where it provides customers with content management and social media tools to deliver relevant web content, promote user engagement and community development through personalization, and increase web site loyalty. The plan is to combine it with existing Oracle CRM applications to provide a suite of web experience management applications.
Web experience management and social media hold the promise of a fresh revenue stream for Oracle and its partners (as it does for other established enterprise application vendors), as enterprises explore the new landscape. With traditional enterprise application vendors under pressure to maintain growth rates in a mature market where the bulk of their revenue comes from maintenance contracts, fresh streams are important. (see Enterprise Software & Application Services – Disruption Rules).
Of course, FatWire alone is not the solution but it adds to Oracle’s expanding CRM portfolio. It will also sit neatly alongside ATG, which provides a web site management and ecommerce platform (see Oracle's billion dollar bid for ATG). Oracle is linking established and emerging technology - transactional CRM, web and social media, and ecommerce transactions – and starting to meld social technology into the enterprise brain.
