Yet Another Headless CMS? Oracle Launches Its Content Hub.

There are foreseeable benefits to adopting technology that will allow a business to publish content on any channel whether it's on social, on-site, or on another channel or device we've yet to imagine.

This idea of "future proofing" content distribution will allow enterprises to adapt to new channels as they come along, with no disruption according to Oracle Senior Director of Product Development David Le Strat who spoke with Website Magazine ahead of today's launch of the Oracle Content and Experience Cloud.

At first mention, Oracle Content and Experience Cloud sounds a lot like other "headless" content management systems making the rounds with new releases. Its potential, however, may be in future versions.

Let's back up.

Oracle Content and Experience Cloud allows for the management of content to be published on any channel. Mid- to large-sized organizations (B2B or B2C) are likely to benefit the most from adopting this more centralized content management platform, which includes the ability to collaborate (discuss, share and annotate content) and leverage APIs to deliver content in a number of places - think Alexa or any other smart-home device.

As an Oracle product, the Content and Experience Cloud also benefits from integrations with other clouds like Social Cloud. The former will manage the curation, approval and publishing of content with the social channel taking it from there - listening and monitoring the social activity.

A business doesn't need to be ran entirely on Oracle to leverage its Content and Experience Cloud, and here are a few reasons they should consider the product:

  • Say a company is running ecommerce outside of the Oracle ecosystem, then Oracle takes a "headless" approach to how it complements a commerce infrastructure so it's not about ripping and replacing.

  • Today, when the Content and Experience Cloud delivers content it relies on external analytics systems with the first release to measure traffic, effectiveness and other metrics. Le Strat, however, says it's an area of important investment so much so that Oracle is thinking of operational analytics - how quickly the users create content, was the provided example.  

    The possibilities, however, are easy to imagine. Since businesses of all sizes are creating content at rapid clip, it's incredible to think of what internal metrics could do for them. For instance, think if a company could measure and marry who's writing what content, how much are they paid, how much time was spent in the post-production process with how successful the content was at converting, what channels did it perform best, and how efficient was the marketer/content creator at testing and optimizing as well as choosing the appropriate topics, selecting the right photos, taking advantage of other factors like inventory...

  • Finally, one of the key capabilities of the Content and Experience Cloud is the ability to re-use content across channels. With one centralized content hub, marketers can easily create, share, manage and publish content to any channel, including business documents, digital assets, user-generated content and Web content. The ability to re-use content not only cuts down on the vast resources required to create content variations used to personalize messages to segments and, more granular, individuals, but also keeps brand messaging and experience consistent when previously used content and assets can be easily fetched. With Content and Experience Cloud as the content hub and integrating with marketing, social, commerce and Oracle's other clouds, there's the potential to create seamless experiences with less manual effort.

While much of the language used to describe the Oracle Content and Experience Cloud is similar to recent launches from other vendors, the value in this product should be proven by the future addition of operational analytics, as a content hub that ties operational data with performance metrics is something - dare we say - unique to the space.