Oracle has announced its intention to acquire FatWire, a US-based web content management software vendor.

FatWire counts some of the largest companies in the world among its customers, including US retail giant Walmart. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

According to Apoorv Durga, a web content management expert at IT analyst company Real Story Group, the acquisition can be seen as an admission by Oracle that its existing solution is not up to scratch.

"In my view, Oracle finally realised that its own web publishing offering was just not good enough compared to many other offerings in the market, and there was just no point in investing resources in that," he said today. "Customers need more agility and flexibility than they could offer and so they certainly had this gap to plug."

"FatWire, with its Java based underpinnings, provided a decent fit," he added. "This will enable them to go after pure play web content management deals more aggressively."

Information management giant EMC also "gave up" on its own web content management product recently, Durga said, and it decided instead to partner with ‘pure play’ providers including FatWire. "It will be interesting to see if EMC does something now," he remarked.