ECM market consolidation in high gear
Regarding mergers and acquisitions, the ECM vendor market was relatively calm in 2007. This is definitely not the case for the very young 2008: the first weeks of the New Year have seen some pretty interesting announcements.
There was much speculation on the acquisition of BEA by Oracle - making Oracle end up with 4 different portal products in their portfolio. Less noticed was that Oracle also acquired the small and unknown US company Captovation, a document capture software company. Oracle had probably noticed that the document capture market is booming business with impressive performances from the market leaders like Kofax and EMC Documentum with its Captiva imaging and capture suite. If they wanted to become a serious ECM player - they needed to address this important document capture market too.
The biggest announcement was the acquisition of Norwegian enterprise search vendor FAST by....Microsoft. FAST had been the rising star in the enterprise search market and was highly regarded by analysts. But the announcement was pretty surprising since Microsoft only recently announced its own search engine portfolio and the underlying technology platforms used by FAST are not Microsoft based at all. It will certainly be interesting to see how this acquisition will turn out, but it again makes clear how determined Microsoft is to become a leading player in the field of enterprise search.
The FAST-acquisition also had a little side effect in the OEM-world: EMC Documentum had integrated the FAST search engine in its Documentum 5.3 platform but the same day Microsoft announced they were about to acquire FAST, EMC declared they would replace the FAST search engine with...Autonomy.
EMC Documentum itself has also been busy with expanding it product portfolio: they acquired Document Sciences, a document output software company that offers solutions for complex and high volume publishing projects.
As mergers and acquisitions do tend to come in waves, it will be interesting to see what else 2008 has got in mind for us.
2008 predictions by CMSWire
Some ECM focused sites have developed the tradition to make some predictions for the year to come. CMSWire has jumped on this wagon but decided to give it a parody twist. Quite funny - at least if you're into ECM.
(CMSWire)
How big should your Intranet team be?
The question that arises often when planning a new intranet is: how many people should be on our intranet team? Some interesting figures and possible impact by adopting 2.0 technologies are listed on the blog of Intranet consultant Jane McConnell.
(Jane McConnell)
The importance of an experienced CMS implementation partner
Content management has seen major traction in the last couple of years and fast growing markets usually attract some more 'opportunistic' market players. If you are looking for a - long term - partner to help you out with the design, planning and actual implementation phase of your content management project, make sure you choose a dedicated and experienced CMS player. The people at CMS Myth have also noticed the growing presence of 'hit-and-run' organizations in CMS-land.
(CMS Myth)
FREE Amplexor Seminar "Open Source Enterprise Content Management"
In the world of content management, open source alternatives have long been limited to web content management solutions. During the last couple of years we have seen the arrival of new open source projects which not only cover web content management but also other ECM disciplines like document management, digital asset management, collaboration, search and even records management.
Another trend is the rise of commercial organizations which provide support and services around certain open source projects. Some of them – like Alfresco – are even the founding body of the project all together.
