Enter the year Autonomy in acquisition mode

So welcome to 2009.

We are in the midst of a global recession. There is a new US President. And the day after inauguration Autonomy has moved to acquire Interwoven. What a start !

So Autonomy has now moved into the ECM space with this acquisition and places them on the Gartner MQ as a serious player. The rationale for the purchase from Autonomy is as follows:

The combination of Autonomy's Meaning Based Computing technologies (IDOL) (with
its ability to understand content) with Interwoven's suite of products (focused
on managing the interactions of people and content) will create a new set of
technologies, updating and enhancing Interwoven's products by significantly
reducing the levels of manual effort now required. These technologies are ready
to address the new need for manage-in-place and extend Autonomy's reach into a
new customer base. Interwoven's products know what the customer interactions
are, and Autonomy's IDOL will allow them to know what they mean.

A full press release is outlined on the Autonomy site

http://www.autonomy.com/content/News/Releases/2009/0122.en.html

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?

ECM What does consolidation mean for customers?

Consolidation has been happening in the ECM marketplace for some time now. In a previous post I looked at the Gartner Magic Quadrant for ECM over a period of years to see how things had progressed and who was still on and who was off the radar.

If you are interested in this post called Quadrants, consolidation and sausages. Following on from this previous blog entry, I have been wondering what consolidation means for customers? Well here are a couple of thoughts on the situation.

On the positive side vendor consolidation creates a greater opportunity for software to broaden out for the customer, that is, if the vendor is an innovation focused company. Acquisition of smaller companies by a larger one allow the acquiring company to rapidly assimilate innovation and deliver new value through synergy with their existing technology. This creates a 1+1=3 offering for customers, and provides some longevity to the company that has acquired the innovation. Alas this perfection is not always reality.

On the negative side acquisition can also stifle innovation as the big fish gobble up smaller more innovative players, possibly as a blocking play to consolidate their position. Maintenance revenues for these vendors are a large and certain thing, especially when you have a massive target to make, you need to fill up the yearly quota with consistent and repeatable revenue. Often the mantra of management is "no disruption", "no bugs"so that customers are happy and pay out the cheques.

Hopefully there are not too many companies that take this attitude, but have a more balanced outlook and acquire for the betterment of the customer base, to increase their competitive advantage and to drive greater value of product functionality and ease of use for the customer.

After all it is for the customers benefit that we are building all this stuff anyway? Which camp is your vendor in, ask some questions and find out. Be sure not to ask too close to an end of quarter cycle!

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.