Video accounted for two-thirds of all Internet traffic in 2013 and that figure is set to rise to nearly 80 percent by 2018, according to the latest Virtual Networking Index  from Cisco Systems Inc. The challenge of managing and delivering that much data is one that Oracle Corp. hopes to address with the acquisition of Front Porch Digital Inc., one of the few technology vendors with an Emmy under its belt. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

The Colorado-based firm received the prestigious television award for its SAMMA family of modernization solutions,  – which use  technology it obtained in the 2008 acquisition of SAMMA Systems Inc. – to automate the digital preservation of traditional tapes. But Oracle is more interested in Front Porch Digital’s data management lineup, which provides an alternative to Hadoop for video workloads that stretches the full breadth of the hybrid cloud.

For on-premise environments, the company’s DIVArchive platform enables organizations to store vast amounts of media content on low-cost commodity hardware with the kind of of reliability they would typically expect from more expensive proprietary appliances. The value proposition is identical to Hadoop’s in that regard, but  the similarity ends there.

Whereas the Hadoop batch processing framework is designed for crunching different types of unstructured data, DIVArchive is specifically optimized to store video and provides a number of purpose-built features to that end, such as automatic verification of content quality and integration with popular editing tools.

The cloud component of  Front Porch Digital’s portfolio, meanwhile, centers on a managed storage offering called Lynx that offers the benefits of DIVArchive without the large upfront capital investments and management complexity needed for on-site deployments. The offering comes with an optional analytical add-on that the company says can help customers identify ways to generate more revenue from their video libraries by better understanding usage patterns.

Between DIVArchive and Lynx, Front Porch Digital claims to manage some 750 petabytes of data for more than 550 customers, including media companies like ESPN, MTV and the BBC and non-media organizations such as the The Library of Congress.

Front Porch Digital  supports platforms other than Oracle, and the database giant said it has no intention to change that. Oracle does intend to integrate the acquired firm’s technology into its Engineered Systems lineup.

The deal indicates that while Oracle may be coming to terms with the new way of storing unstructured data, it’s still bent on making the most out of its legacy revenue streams.

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