Oracle has launched its first enterprise content management (ECM) solution since its acquisition of ECM specialist Stellent in December last year.

The new Universal Content Management (UCM) 10G product is based largely on Stellent technology, with Oracle’s former ECM offering, Content DB 3, “rolled in” as an implementation option on the price list.

The database giant has also simplified its ECM pricing model, reducing a bewildering 51 options down to “a handful”, with licences available on either a per user or per CPU basis.

UCM 10g adds integration with Microsoft Sharepoint, JSR 168-compliant portlets for dynamic content access, service orientated architecture (SOA) support that makes the format conversion engine available as a web service and integration with Oracle’s secure enterprise search (SES).

Andrew Gilboy, Oracle’s EMEA head of ECM, said that Oracle is the only vendor to offer a single product offering all of these functions. The vendor competes with IBM Filenet and EMC Documentum, as well as Interwoven, Vignette and Open Text in the ECM space.

“This is a single product with a single API built from the ground up,” said Gilboy. “Other products can do some of these things, but not the web content, audit functions, integrated UCM management and so on, though EMC may argue otherwise about Documentum.”

Gilboy said he had heard nothing negative from Stellent’s 4,400 global customers (400 of which are based in the EMEA region) about the Oracle acquisition, and is confident that Oracle will retain its estimated 1900 global Content DB 3 subscribers as well.

“Nearly all of those customers have Oracle as their database application, and UCM 10G makes it easier for them to integrate ECM with what they already have,” Gilboy said.

Recent figures from IDC suggest Oracle still dominates the overall database market, apparently bolstered by broad acceptance of its 10g R2 database release.

The company’s market share for relational database management systems (RDMS) software for 2006 remained static at 44.4 percent over the previous year, said the analyst. IBM retained second place with 21.2 percent for DB2, while Microsoft SQL increased from 17 to 18.6 percent year on year.

The overall market grew by 14.3 percent, however, with all five featured vendors, including Sybase and Teradata, reporting licence and revenue growth.