But the real point I like is why Oracle can do this, I’d say why no one else can. If you look at how Oracle dominated the market it was by creating an open standard ODMA. They pushed the standard and made every other vendor look like a fool if they didn’t get on board. Oracle knew their product was the best and made sure that it was easy for anyone to develop solutions on their platform or anyone else’s by making relational database development a standardized approach. Basically leveling the playing field.

So as a VAR spent time trying to work with competing vendor, Oracle would push to make sure they were following standards. Then once the VAR realized that Oracle was better it was an easy transition to the platform as a standard had been followed.

No one in the ECM space is willing to do this because they don’t believe in their own products. They’re too afraid that customers and VARs will want to change over that they make their platforms incredibly complex to make sure that migration costs are extremely high. “I know we have problems but are you sure you want to spend x millions to go to Vendor B?”

Standards in the ECM field seem to last only a few years. That’s not something you build your product’s future on.