Oracle to acquire Front Porch Digital

The deal is expected to close before the end of the year. Until then it is “business as usual”, Oracle said, with each company to continue to operate independently.

Oracle is now reviewing Front Porch’s product roadmap.

It said it was “committed to protecting and enhancing customer investments in Front Porch Digital’s solutions” and that it would make “significant engineering investments” in Front Porch’s systems.

It also pledged to “further optimise Front Porch’s products with Oracle technologies while maintaining the technology-agnostic profile for Front Porch Digital’s offerings”.

Colorado-headquartered Front Porch offers cloud and on-premise systems, including Samma, (pictured) DivaArchive, DivaDirector and Lynx for organisations to manage their content.

It has more than 550 clients including BBC Studios and Post Production, A&E Television and Discovery Communications and helps manage over 750 petabytes of digital content.

Front Porch chief executive Mike Knaisch (pictured) said: “Front Porch Digital has developed industry leading solutions that help companies manage large-scale digital content.

“We are thrilled to be joining Oracle to continue our long-standing partnership.

“This combination will enable us to better serve and support our customers at a global scale.”

Oracle has some 400,000 customers across a wide range of industries, including automotive, government, financial services, manufacturing and retail sectors. Last year the company made $37.2bn in revenue.

Oracle said its acquisition of Front Porch would create “the most comprehensive enterprise-grade content storage management solution to help organisations efficiently manage the growing complexities associated with the migration, integration, storage, and delivery of rich media content”.

Oracle Systems executive vice president John Fowler added: “Organisations need a modern, integrated content storage management solution to manage and monetise their valuable rich media assets.

“We will continue to build on Front Porch Digital’s success and unique capabilities, which complement Oracle’s existing high performance and scalable engineered storage solutions.”