Oracle has agreed to acquire Front Porch Digital, which specializes in big data-based digital content storage, management and delivery.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Front Porch’s 550 customers include NASCAR, BBC Broadcast, MTV, ESPN, A&E Television, China Central TV, Al Jazeera and broadcast content companies in Korea and Europe. The company provides migration services to move content from analog to digital, cloud-based storage, and multi-channel delivery solutions. One of the company’s areas of focus is multichannel content delivery that includes optimization for smartphones and tablets, and the ability to develop virtual services such as the cloud, as well as metadata capture and management.
According to Oracle, Front Porch manages 750 petabytes of content for companies in 80 countries, which it says is the world’s largest digital video archive.
“The explosive growth of today’s rich media has created immense challenges for companies in media and entertainment and across various industries with large-scale digital content,” said John Fowler, EVP of Oracle, in a letter to customers and partners on the acquisition. “Front Porch Digital’s industry leading cloud and on-premise solutions help organizations seamlessly manage the rapidly expanding and complex volumes of digital media content, such as high-definition films and TV shows, medical images and records, and real-time security monitoring feeds.”
Fowler said that Front Porch’s offerings complement Oracle’s storage solutions and that the combination “is expected to create the most comprehensive enterprise-grade content storage management solution to help organizations efficiently manage the growing complexities associated with the migration, integration, storage, and delivery of rich media content.”
Fowler said that both companies will continue to operate as usual until the transaction closes, which is expected later this year. Oracle also said that it expects to make substantial engineering investments in Front Porch’s content storage management offerings and optimize the company’s solutions with its own while maintaining Front Porch’s technology-agnostic approach.
Oracle added that Front Porch “has established relationships and technical integrations with leading production, play-out and media asset management systems,” and it is “committed to preserving and building upon these existing partnerships and open standards,” such as Archive EXchange Format.
