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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By Lynda Moulton | Posted 10:44am | November 12, 2009
Ron,
I totally agree with you about the significance of a major search company acquiring CMS software. Many of the problems with search, particularly in the enterprise, begin with poor governance of content, lack of or bad metadata, and missing quality assurance around what should get ingested in search indices.
Autonomy clearly recognizes the synergy among the software components (while also getting a lot of new customers for their search solutions). Unfortunately for the small-medium enterprise Autonomy's "suite of products" will probably be costly to license and implement. Let us hope for the marketplace that we see more collaboration among CMS and search vendors who understand good integration between the two types of software. They can compete by offering more complete out-of-the-box solutions.
By rmiller | Posted 12:31pm | November 15, 2009
Hi Lynda:
Thanks for the comment. Absolutely, to me search is the key to any good CMS because it doesn't matter how well you manage the content if employees can't find it and take advantage of it.
Ron
