Consolidation musings and Open Source dark horses

Intersting to see that the rash of vendor consolidation continues unabated from the pre Xmas rush.

Microsoft puts out the stocking and stuffs in FAST. This is an interesting play in the battle of the Titans (read Microsoft and Google). But it is also an interesting play in the Search piece of the ECM Market. Love them or hate them Microsoft entered the ECM market big time with MOSS 2007 and from the vendor stands at the annual AIIM Conference they have made a big statement over the last couple of years. It has been commonly said that once Microsoft enters a market in three years they tend to dominate.

As I have talked internally in my own business for a couple of years consolidation is coming down to one to two serious horizontal platform players and the traditional ECM specialist companies are looking desperately as to how they are going to differentiate themselves or die.

Some like EMC have the pleasure or pain of being part of a wider super tanker company and therefore can balance out the software side of the business with the tin sales that are made year on year, but others are in a serious position of looking to get purchased or face getting squeezed in the process.

Now the dark horses are the Open Source players such as Alfresco and Nuxeo. While these guys may not feature on ye old "Gartner Magic Quadrant" they are really becoming quite serious in the capability that they can offer.

Alfresco has a serious line up of architectural power that comes out of the roots of Documentum and Interwoven. Having all the industry scars but not having to be encumbered with an Architecture that is now set, they have been able to re think and retool for the "new age". I have been watching them for awhile and now that they have records management in the offering it will be interesting to see the customer pick up in the "government" type clients.