It's clear to anyone that follows content management, that consolidation goes part and parcel with this business. In fact, Alan Pelz-Sharpe wrote about this in a recent Industry Voices post. Heck, there was an outrageous rumor last week that Oracle was interested in EMC. Rumors have also surfaced this year about about a possible Open Text-Autonomy merger. That would be the height of irony, wouldn't it? Two companies that make a living purchasing other companies joining together. But those are just rumors.

This special report looks at actual mergers and acquisitions that went down this year. Maybe the biggest, and perhaps the most shocking came when Adobe (NASDAQ: ADBE) bought Day Software. It was especially interesting given that Adobe already has a working relationship with Alfresco, but it shows that big companies with deep pockets will go out and buy the pieces they believe they need to fill in their catalogues.

Sometimes it's about customer lists. Sometimes it's about revenue. Sometimes it's even about the products, believe it or not. But whatever the reason, in the content management business the merger and acquisition beat just seems to go on.

Here's a look at some of the ones we covered this year.