As the media and entertainment industry embraces digital, internet-based and on-demand content, broadcasters and publishers need sophisticated, interoperable software solutions based on a flexible, scalable and reliable central database. Oracle is currently seeking software application vendor partners to approach this market jointly.

Oracle: an established force in the media and entertainment sector

Oracle's database and applications software is an established force in the media and entertainment industries: Yahoo!, for example, runs the world's largest database on Oracle. B2B publishing group Reed Elsevier has the third largest OLTP database in the world, also with Oracle. All of the 500 top global entertainment companies, as well as four of the five top newspaper groups in the US, run Oracle Applications.

The latest developments in our Oracle Database 10g platform make it the most scalable, most secure, most reliable and highest-performing relational database engine available for today's modern operating systems: Windows, Unix and Linux.

Our commitment to enabling value for money for end-users has resulted in our Grid Computing architecture, which enables one single Oracle database to be run seamlessly across multiple applications and multiple low-cost server blades - allowing customers to add more processor power as required, with no loss of service and to almost limitless scalability.

Meanwhile, new features like Oracle Search facilitate the deepest level of granularity in content searching, while the ability to have all data in one repository means that organisations can gain a 360-degree view of the content that they hold - whether they need to know, for example who owns the rights, if a piece of content is suitable for a particular programme or news story, or the financial cost of each piece of content.

This makes Oracle Database 10g an excellent proposition for the media and entertainment industry, which is struggling to find solutions to manage not just the wealth of digital content it is creating, but also the metadata that describes that content and enables it to be searched, retrieved and repurposed.

With its support for a wide variety of file types, Oracle Database 10g can act as the primary repository for content and metadata, while the open-standards-based Oracle Fusion Middleware means third-party applications can easily integrate with other applications in the customer's IT infrastructure to share data and enable seamless cross-application business processes.

Software vendor partners needed

Oracle offers an extensive array of business applications, including Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards. Partnerships with third-party software vendors for niche media and entertainment solutions are critical to our success in this very important sector. We have developed a number of specific initiatives to address this sector, and we need to know about third-party solutions that we can incorporate into our national and EMEA-wide go-to-market initiatives. In particular, we are looking to partner with software vendors in the areas of intellectual property management, ,customer insight and digital asset management.

As existing media and entertainment companies seek to consolidate their IT infrastructures around a single technology platform and a handful of strategic applications, and new players like telecommunications providers start to compete with tradtional industry players, there are many opportunities opening up for Oracle and its partners in this space.

Working with Oracle will give country-specific software vendors the opportunity to find new markets in new geographies. As a major, global technology vendor, we have significant resources to dedicate to developing joint business with our ISV partners, and the commitment to help ISVs extend their markets and their revenues.

If you have a top-class solution for the media and entertainment industry and are interested in finding out more about how working with Oracle will help you realise your business ambitions, please contact me at christy.lally@oracle.com to discuss how we can take the relationship further.

Christy Lally
Business Development Director, Media & Entertainment, Oracle EMEA