Oracle snapped up two more companies in the past two days, buying enterprise content management software developer Stellent on Thursday for $13.50 per share, or approximately $440 million, and utility company management software provider SPL on Friday for an undisclosed sum.

The Stellent deal made the most waves, bringing Oracle into a space occupied by other content management software developers like IBM’s FileNet, EMC’s Documentum, Interwoven, Vignette, and Open Text.

“Oracle’s acquisition of Stellent is directly in line with the IBM acquisition of FileNet this past summer and EMC’s acquisition of Documentum several years ago,” said MurrayBeach, president of M&A International and Boston Corporate Finance, in a statement.

“Oracle has a good document management solution, but Stellent will bring them more capabilities in handling unstructured data and corporate information,” he added. “On a combined basis, we believe that this acquisition will significantly strengthen Oracle’s offering in the convergence of the structured and unstructured data within their customers.”

The acquisitions are just the latest in a string of purchases by the company. Last month, Oracle bought data integration software vendor Sunopsis and MetaSolv, a mobile service activation provider (see Oracle Sucks up Sunopsis and Oracle Nabs MetaSolv for $219 Million). Those were the 23rd and 24th acquisitions, respectively, for the database giant in the past two years.

Oracle has also been developing Fusion software to tie together some of its more massive recent acquisitions like PeopleSoft, Siebel, and JD Edwards with its own database systems.

Shares of Oracle fell $0.48 to $17.79 in recent trading. Oracle and SPL did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A Stellent spokesperson referred press inquiries to Oracle.

Layering in Content Management

Oracle plans to leverage Stellent Universal Content Management to allow customers to deploy various line-of-business applications, including web sites, intranets, extranets, compliance processes, and marketing brand management.

The RedwoodShores, California-based database giant said the acquisition would complement and extend its existing content management products.

Oracle already offers a content database that will work with Stellent’s software, as well as a variety of its own management systems for handling documents, web content, information rights, digital assets, records retention, imaging, governance, risk, and regulatory compliance.

But along with the extra software, Eden Prairie, Minnesota-based Stellent also brings with it more than 4,700 customers from around the world, including large organizations like Procter & Gamble, Merrill Lynch, Los Angeles County, Home Depot, British Red Cross, ING, Vodafone, Georgia Pacific, Bayer, and Genzyme.

“Stellent’s enterprise content management solutions enable a variety of people within an organization to create, capture, store, manage, publish, view, search, and archive all types of documents across their entire lifecycle,” Oracle Senior Vice President Thomas Kurian said in a statement.

Oracle expects the Stellent acquisition to close by the end of this year or early next year.

Content Management Consolidation

Mr. Beach pointed out that after Stellent, there are very few pure play ECM players left in the market. Open Text remains the largest standalone company in the space, after having completed its $489-million acquisition of Hummingbird last month.

Max Carnecchia, president of Interwoven, has also been noticing increasing consolidation in the enterprise content management space that his company occupies, but said he doesn’t feel threatened by Oracle.

Mr. Carnecchia expects to see Oracle taking on IBM, EMC, and Open Text rather than challenging his company. He also anticipates further consolidation among the content management vendors.

“Oracle had some of their own products and offerings and now they’ve augmented those with a proven and established provider in the form of Stellent,” said Mr. Carnecchia. “I think it’s a positive thing in the marketplace overall. The strategy at Interwoven is we get above and beyond the platform, and we build solutions for specific verticals and by our partners.”

He believes Oracle captured Stellent because of Stellent’s background in compliance, scanning, and imaging, and anticipates that Oracle will put Stellent into its Fusion middleware group.

SPL Gets into Utilities

The very latest acquisition, SPL, brings Oracle further into the realm of utility companies and public sector agencies. Oracle acquired the San Francisco-based company from private equity funds managed by GFI Energy Ventures.

SPL provides revenue and operations management software for the utilities industry and tax management software for government organizations.

The software takes care of functions such as customer care and billing, mobile workforce management, outage and distribution management, and asset management for electric, gas, and water utilities.

SPL also sells tax management systems for managing the financial relationships a government agency has with its constituents.

The acquisition will help Oracle provide an across-the-board revenue and operations management system for utilities, as well as a tax management system to meet the revenue management needs of the public sector.

Oracle plans to integrate SPL’s management team and employees into the company by putting them in a dedicated global utilities business unit within Oracle focused on the utilities industry.

The SPL employees will also continue to support the development of tax management software for the public sector. SPL CEO Larry Hagewood will lead the unit as general manager.

Mr. Beach doesn’t think the SPL acquisition is related closely to the Stellent purchase, but more toward Oracle’s financial product line.

“It’s a pretty small piece of the puzzle,” he said. “Stellent’s really dealing with what we would call unstructured data inside the enterprise and that’s a big area of growth for the future. Oracle has really the best known position within structured data. With Stellent, they bought one of the true best-of-breed players. They could have looked at buying a bigger player like Open Text, but instead of going for size, with Stellent they got the better technology.”

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