Oracle Acquires Front Porch Digital; Plan Is To Remain Separate Business Unit

Asset-management–system provider Front Porch Digital was acquired by Oracle today, and Front Porch Digital COO/GM Rino Petricola tells SVG that Oracle plans to have Front Porch Digital operate as a separate business unit in order to not disturb its ongoing business and current customers.

“We will remain a business unit that will focus on the existing market and will also start to address other markets,” he says. “But the team will remain the same, and the points of contact will remain the same.”

Petricola adds that there is no overlap between the technologies offered by the two companies: Front Porch Digital sells software to control storage resources, and Oracle builds storage-resource hardware and related technologies.

“There are a lot of complementary products between the two companies,” he explains. “We are already a partner, as our software layer can control Oracle storage infrastructure.”

Front Porch Digital has more than 550 organizations already relying on its asset-management platform and, all told, helps manage more than 750 PB of content. Petricola says the next step will be to evaluate the Oracle portfolio and see which of its products and services can also become of the product offering to media clients like NASCAR, BBC, Discovery Communications, and the U.S. Library of Congress.

“There are a lot of synergies like digital-rights–management products that are a fit for us and the media industry,” he explains.

The move by Oracle is designed less as a way to enter the broadcast market and more as a means to apply Front Porch Digital’s technology to other market segments. Petricola recalls that, in the early days of Front Porch Digital’s existence, one of the goals was to work with not only the media industry but also government, medical, and other industries.

“Oracle wants to leverage DivArchive into other markets, and that is great for us. In the early days, we focused on any industries that needed to manage large files,” he says. “We started to investigate other markets, but we needed someone with the resources like Oracle to invest in order to do that.”

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