ECM What's up with Consolidation?

Consolidation news has been big over the last year and tracking back through some old threads and links has been an interesting catch up.

In general consolidation is a natural occurrence as companies look to dominate market share and the battle for customers. I found a slide deck share from John Mancini (The One Minute ECM Guru series) which covers consolidation very quickly.

What was especially telling was the slides that outlined the number of companies that have been acquired from the likes of OpenText and EMC. Looks more like the local Org chart of the multinational itself. How are they going to get that all together in a single, flexible, scalable platform? Will Consolidation provide you and me any benefits

Better product to create better solutions in a more cost effective manner?
Better Service and reduced complexity across the ECM stack?
Better capability to be able to federate across multiple repositories?

Only time will tell if we are to see a major shift of benefit to the customer.

What I do know is that all this consolidation creates an opportunity for new players to slip into the middle ground, especially now that the Gartner Magic Quadrant now looks more like a sausage in shape as the vendors spread out.

The big opportunity is for players such as Alfresco to get the ground swell going and gain market acceptance of Open Source and get in amongst the large and heavy incumbents with the promotion of a new and exciting model and innovative and flexible architecture.

Microsoft (Already a Gartner player) has the opportunity to take advantage of current consolidation to dominate through a "ECM for the Masses" approach thereby driving mass market adoption of ECM type deployments and pulling through other partners in a cost effective delivery of ECM projects across departments and eventually into the enterprise. The key for them will be what next past the MOSS 2007 release?