So I was just casually heading over to look at an older Big Men on Content post when I saw their latest. It seems that Interwoven was purchased today by Autonomy. Uh, WOW! Okay, maybe a bit of an over-reaction, but with Vignette in a death spiral, what is next for them?
Before we get to Vignette, lets look at the news itself.
A couple of weeks ago, the Big Men were speculating on potential buyers for OpenText. I opined that maybe HP would be looking to enter the market to compete with EMC. It was a brilliant piece of insight for all the wrong reasons. Right buyer, wrong target.
Turns out that HP has decided to buy their way into the market, but only with a single product, Tower Software. Like EMC, HP is looking to broaden their Information Management offering by adding Records Management and eDiscovery. If that is all they were looking to add, then buy Tower was a great move. I have always heard good things about their software for those purposes, though I always had doubts as to their complete ECM capability.
I spent a good part of my day today attending the SharePoint meets ECM seminar in Washington, DC. Organized by AIIM, this seminar was marketed as an introduction of MOSS into the world of ECM. So I went to see and hear stories of SharePoint either as a front-end to an ECM platform, or as a platform unto itself. The day didn’t start well.
Several months ago, Russ Stalter posted on how he was Disillusioned with the Current Definition of ECM. Russ provides a new definition for ECM, which I believe is better, but still suffers some of the same deficiencies of the current definitions. Tower Software picked up on the thread, deriding the box-checking definitions out there.
Word of Pie 