Oracle Acquires Another Piece of the CXM Puzzle With FatWire

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Oracle announced yesterday that it has agreed to buy web content management (WCM) vendor FatWire. The prominent vendors in the WCM market have been flying off the shelves - relatively speaking - over the past few years as larger vendors recognize the value of content management and delivery platforms as part of an overall digital customer experience management (CXM) portfolio. After all, you can't really manage experiences without a content foundation, can you? To this end, Adobe acquired Day, Autonomy acquired Interwoven, and now this latest deal. Oracle didn't reveal how much they paid for FatWire (too bad, because there's nothing we analysts love more than debating whether or not someone overpaid/underpaid for a company).

FatWire's acquisition has been a foregone conclusion in WCM circles for some time now, since it was one of the last independent vendors with a proven enterprise track record. Many have speculated on possible FatWire suitors over the past few years, a list that has included at times IBM, and fellow WCM vendor Interwoven, prior to its own acquisition by Autonomy. FatWire has had a dalliance with enterprise content management vendor EMC over the past year or so; the two began a strategic partnership, with EMC acquiring a minority stake in FatWire and promoting it as its solution in the CXM space. However, EMC later struck another partnership with SDL Tridion, so it appeared that the bloom was off the rose in the EMC/FatWire romance, and prospects for EMC's full acquisition of FatWire grew dim.

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