Oracle

The ECM world is dominated by EMC, Open Text, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle -- all big vendors with equally big publicity machines to keep their brands and "story" right, front and center.

CMS Watch's analyst team peers into 2009 and comes up with twelve predictions for buyers of content technologies. The economic downturn will surely have an impact, say the analysts, but a plethora of broader trends will surface as well, including some hesitation in the face of the next SharePoint, bad omens for Oracle, and perhaps even long-awaited consolidation in the Web CMS industry...

As indicated in its new portal strategy back in late June, Oracle is continuing to develop and support WebLogic Portal. Last week Oracle released WebLogic Portal 10.3, as a follow up to BEA's last release of WebLogic Portal back in March.

Cloud computing is one of those buzzphrases that, like "redistribution of income," seems to make otherwise dispassionate people hyperventilate. Oracle founder Larry Ellison, speaking at the recent Oracle OpenWorld conference, raised quite a few eyebrows when he derided "cloud computing" as "complete gibberish" in an extended on-stage rant before an audience of financial analysts.

Babelgum's chief operating officer Michael O'Callaghan is to leave the P2P online video platform, we have learned and confirmed with the company - just the latest senior-level switch this year. O'Callaghan is based in Dublin in his native Ireland, where the company is headquartered for tax reasons.

Proving that print's not dead, it's just going digital, enterprise CMS vendor Open Text is buying document scanning company Captaris for $131 million. Captaris of Bellevue, WA, has a suite of software that converts printed documents to digital, Open Text is based in Canada.

-Radar wasn't the only magazine that went out of business yesterday. O2138, the Harvard magazine, shut down also. [Daily Intel]

-Also, Elle Accessories. [The Daily]

I'm hearing a lot of chatter among social software cognoscenti about how the looming recession will impact the social computing industry. You can even take a survey and contribute your opinion.

Not long ago I blogged about the newly announced Content Management Interoperability Services specification, which is a joint effort of EMC, IBM, Open Text, Oracle, SAP,