Oracle launched its first enterprise content management (ECM) product at its annual user conferencein San Francisco last week.

The database giant announced Oracle Files 10g, designed to manage the flow of information through an organisation, regardless of content format.

'Our customers are seeing the value of a unified workplace where employees can take advantage of collaboration tools to increase productivity without changing the way they work,' said Greg Doherty, Oracle Collaboration Suite vice president.

Oracle Files 10g can be used as a standalone product, but also complements the latest version of the comapny's Collaboration Suite 10g, which offers a one-stop-shop for email, calendaring, instant messaging and web conferencing.

Oracle says the products offer users unprecedented control over both structured and unstructured data because they are built on its Database 10g and Application Server 10g products and so, share the same architecture.

The supplier says Oracle Files 10g will help business users to find data, and establish policies related to regulatory compliance, reducing the risk of sensitive information becomign unprotected, while increasing efficiency.

The product's launch coincides with a new set of business intelligence (BI) tools for Oracle's grid-enabled database technology.

And company president Charler Phillips told delegates that further unbundling of functions is likely, to help target new markets.

'Our definition of an application server is much boarder than that of our competitors,' he said.

'It has been our strategy to get as big a footprint as possible in our customer base, and it has proved effective at keeping our competitors out.

'Now we are unbundling the tools to expand that footprint, reach new markets we haven't reached before and keep growth going.'

Oracle BI 10g contains a query, reporting and analysis tool called Discoverer for relational and online analytical processing (OLAP) data, and a Warehouse Builder component for carrying out extract, transform and load functions to create data warehouses with consistent levels of data quality.