Oracle IRM, the official blog

About Simon Thorpe and IRM

I've been working with Oracle IRM since 1999. The company which created this technology, originally named BreakerTech, was founded by Dr Martin Lambert in 1996. In 1999 Martin secured the first round of funding enabling him to take his technology from the bedroom to the board room. The software, then called SoftSEAL, was initially developed to protect Java classes running inside a modified and secured virtual machine but was soon modified to encrypt and manage access to rich media and documents. After the first funding Martin looked to hire a team and I was the first employee, hired as a developer to build a website front end for selling content on the internet.

Prior to this employment I took my first career steps as a 3D artist creating animations for games company Eidos using packages such as Alias/Wavefront on the SGI platform. Bored of the lack of maturity in the games industry I took a position at Dell computers. I worked on a team of roughly 10 developers and helped develop and maintain the then new online systems for selling Dell hardware. Dell was one of the first companies to really realize the significance of an online presence and the European team at the time was leading the company in this area. Finally in 1999 it was time to join the startup band wagon and I found BreakerTech.

After my interview with Martin (pictured right, and he'll not be happy with me posting that photo!) we continued to hire some of the most skilled developers in the industry. The company continued to develop the technology mainly for use in the publishing world protecting highly valuable content such as financial reports, political journals and research data. We also developed solutions for protecting rich media such as MP3 and video. We soon opened offices in San Francisco and changed the name to the more apt SealedMedia. In 2002 a leap was made to focus more on enterprise document protection and a release of the technology included Microsoft Office formats for Excel, PowerPoint and Word. The first company ever to apply such rich rights controls over common enterprise documents. This complimented the existing suite of formats such as PDF, GIF, JPEG and PNG plus the ability to protect HTML.

This was an important move in the market of DRM which we had previously been associated with and the term Enterprise Rights Management (ERM or sometimes EDRM) was born. Working over the next few years we sold solutions to all sorts of businesses in retail, communications, government and finance. Protecting documents such as board level communications, engineering intellectual property and financial data. Eventually the term Information Rights Management (IRM) was created to define a technology which offers a highly secure, usable and scalable technology which can be deployed to protect organizations most valuable information and to differentiate IRM from the generally ill-designed an ill-fated consumer DRM efforts.

We soon became the world experts in understanding how to take an IRM technology to a customer and understand the effective methods for implementing it to protect their data and processes. Working often at the senior executive level with our customers, we learned how the importance of
usability, separation of duties and easy application of the corporate protection policies was.

Finally, as the market matured we were inevitably hit by consolidation. Content management vendors saw the benefits of ‘beyond the repository’ security and began snapping up IRM start ups. In 2007 Stellent swooped us up and a short 3 months later Oracle took us all under it's wing. SealedMedia was a very highly skilled, small company and I've never met such diligent and knowledgeable people than those who created and ran the company. Nearly all of these skilled people have been retained in Oracle and I’m pleased to say Oracle has retained our ability to develop the worlds leading enterprise Information Rights Management solution. The future here looks very good!