Oracle acquires Front Porch Digital as a separate business unit

Asset management system provider Front Porch Digital was acquired by Oracle today and Rino Petricola, Front Porch Digital COO and general manager, told SVG that Oracle plans to have Front Porch Digital operate as a separate business unit in order to not disturb its ongoing business and current customers.

“We will remain a business unit that will focus on the existing market and will also start to address other markets,” says Petricola. “But the team will remain the same and the points of contact will remain the same.”

Petricola says there is not overlap between the technologies offered by the two companies as Front Porch Digital sells software to control storage resources and Oracle build storage resource hardware and related technologies.

“There are a lot of complementary products between the two companies and we are already a partner as our software layer can control Oracle storage infrastructure,” explains Petricola.

Front Porch Digital has more than 550 organizations already relying on its asset management platform and, all told, helps manage more than 750 petabytes of content. Petricola says the next step will be to evaluate the Oracle portfolio and see which of its products and services can also become of the product offering to media clients like NASCAR, BBC, Discovery Communications, and the U.S. Library of Congress.

“There are a lot of synergies like digital rights management products that are a fit for us and the media industry,” he explains.

The move by Oracle is designed less as a way to enter the broadcast market and more as a means to take Front Porch Digital’s technology and apply it to other market segments. Petricola recalls that in the early days of Front Porch Digital’s existence one of the goals was to work with not only the media industry but also government, medical, and other industries.

“Oracle wants to leverage DivArchive into other markets and that is great for us as in the early days we focused on any industries that needed to manage large files,” says Petricola. “We started to investigate other markets but we needed someone with the resources like Oracle to invest in order to do that.”