Five Biggest Content Management Acquisitions of 2009

There were some major moves in the content management industry this year, and none was bigger than Autonomy's purchase of Interwoven for $775 million in January. As I wrote at the time, the price alone was enough to generate some buzz, but the real impact was the idea that a vendor known mostly for search was buying a content management vendor, rather than the other way around. Instead of adding on an enterprise search tool to a CMS, the search vendor was adding a CMS to its search tool and that's unusual to say the least.

Beyond that, I think EMC buying Kazeon was more significant than Open Text getting Vignette because Kazeon gave EMC a full-fledged eDiscovery product for their Source One family of information governance products. I expect we will see further consolidation next year among a variety of technologies related to content management and it should be interesting to see who is the hunter and the hunted in the buying and selling game. As Autonomy proved, it's not always easy to predict.

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