Two years ago, a journal was discovered while excavating in the Trough of Disillusionment of Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Enterprise Content Management (ECM) technologies. The journal told a story of fear, distrust, and desperation.
Today another tome was discovered. Written hastily in the margins of an IDOL manual was the following text. It is estimated that this was written two days after the conclusion of the previously discovered journal (which you should read 1st). The author is unknown.
One year ago, when Dell announced it was buying EMC, I wrote,
If you see Open Text or CA buy the ECD, start lighting the funeral pyres because Documentum would be officially brain dead and waiting for the machines to be turned off.
Well, it happened. OpenText acquired Documentum. This brings to end the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) wars that began almost 20 years ago. Back then, the leaders were FileNet, Documentum, Oracle, and OpenText. FileNet is buried at IBM who is flirting with Box. Oracle is struggling to reestablish itself after bringing on former Documentum leaders but they are fading away.
This morning, OpenText announced their acquisition of Documentum. I was hesitant to predict that OpenText was going to buy Documentum. It was the obvious prediction and I knew that it would be a chunk of change. $1.62 billion was the final price which covers the $600 million OpenText raised in May and another billion of debt commitment provided by Barclays for this transaction.
I suspect that nobody else was willing to pay EMC that much.
First the basics. Open Text has purchase Recommind, a strong player in the eDiscovery space. This is Open Text’s second significant acquisition in the past few months, the other being when Open Text purchased some customer experience software components from HP including Interwoven and MediaBin. We knew more acquisitions were coming after they then announced that they were raising $600 million and are planning to spend upwards of $3 billion on acquisitions over the next five years.
Yep, the old Open Text is back. They are buying Recommind for only $163 million, meaning they have more money. Before we discuss the elephant in the room, let’s look at what this acquisition means for Open Text.
The following are excerpts from an explorer hiking the Gartner Hype Cycle for Enterprise Content Management (ECM) technologies.
Today we finally reached the Peak of Inflated Expectations. The view is simply amazing. This technology is going to revolutionize everything. Everyone is excited and teaming up with their friends. Documentum just got some great new equipment from EMC. I suspect that those two will be very happy together for a long time.
Life is good.
Apparently everyone is excited and more and more people are joining us on the Peak. While the view is still lovely, the ground is starting to get muddy from all the people trampling everywhere.
Stellent showed up with their new pal Oracle. Everyone thinks they are a bunch of posers but they are mostly keeping quiet because Oracle has a bit of a temper.
There seems to be a new noise. I’m going to go check it out.
That noise from the other day? That was the beginning of an avalanche that carried the entire group off of the Peak. According to our maps we are in the Trough of Disillusionment. It is hard to validate because nobody can get a clear signal anymore. It is a bit gloomy but some people seem to think we can get out.
OMG! Open Text ate Hummingbird while we were sleeping! They must be panicking already.
Tensions are very high.
In case you missed it, Dropbox has followed the path blazed by Box and has integrated with Microsoft Office. While Box integrated on the desktop, Dropbox is integrating with the Office mobile apps and plans to extend it to the Online Office versions. This is a no-brainer move as anything that simplifies people’s ability to work with content within Dropbox helps keep people using both tools.
On top of all this, Microsoft announced that their Android and iOS versions of Office will now be free. Microsoft is clearly trying to maintain their edge on the office productivity world and Dropbox is aiming to stay in front of people’s eyeballs.
In my predictions for 2013, I made the following prediction on the future of the traditional “leaders” in the Content Management space.
First Major On-Premises Traditional ECM Vendor will become Obsolete: I know, obvious right? Statistically speaking, one of those vendors will likely still be a market leader in 10 years. In 2013, we’ll see our next elimination for that spot (though they will be in denial). To make this easier to measure, I’ll name the contenders: EMC, IBM, Open Text, and Oracle. Microsoft falls into this category but it won’t be them, at least not in 2013.
Aside from simple statistical probability, I saw a few things this fall that led to this prediction.
What I’ve seen is a scary amount of consistency among the players.
Back before either Cheryl McKinnon or I were considering bringing our skills to AIIM, we submitted a proposal to this year’s AIIM Conference to moderate a panel on the Future of Content Management. For this discussion, we decided to bring representatives from the traditional, open source, and cloud-based Content Management worlds onto the same stage.
As a result, we have the following on the stage:
Pretty exciting group there. I have laid out some rules that we’ll be enforcing in the debate.
To warm things up, I asked them some questions to set the stage for next week. In addition, if you have any questions you’d like to submit to be put to the panel, add them to the comments below. I will be writing a follow-up afterwards to capture the debate.
For years, I’ve had a crazy uncle, Owen Tedford. Now crazy Uncle Owen always like to collect baseball cards. I’ve always liked baseball cards so I always like to visit with Owen for short periods of time.
We always considered him eccentric and not crazy until he started buying other collections. While that wasn’t crazy in and of itself, it was what he did, or didn’t do, with the cards. He wouldn’t look at the collection for overlap before buying it. He would see one or two cards that he didn’t have and just buy.
Once uncle Owen got the collection, he would put the new collection in his shed and slowly cull it for individual cards to add to his main collection. The leftover parts of the collections slowly deteriorating outside in the shed.
We were worried about crazy Uncle Owen being crushed by his rotting collection of cards on a trip to the shed. We figured it was only a few more years until the sheer dead weight of it all collapsed. Then he met Artie, the town loon.
Last year I succumbed to the pressure of being one of the only bloggers to NOT have predictions for 2010. So on the last day of the year, I threw together a post with some predictions.
As a side effect, I have to evaluate them now. I am going to score them as either correct, incorrect, or partial (50%). The partial is for predictions that were correct in the causes, but the effects were off.
So, let’s dive into the juicy goodness.
So I promised an ECM specific follow-up to my book review on Christensen’s book The Innovator’s Dilemma. There is a lot to talk about, so I’m not going to blather on with a long intro (though this sentence seems to be compounding the issue) and get right to it.
Or not…I have some disclaimers/notes:
NOW we can get started.
Word of Pie 