Just when I was getting bored watching this market – Interwoven announced today that they are being acquired by Autonomy. The mamoth search vendor driving consolidation in a slightly new direction. We’ve seen a number of acquisitions as ECM is incorporated into the portfolios of traditional hardware vendors.(IBM/FileNet, EMC/Documentum,HP/Tower) This is interesting because there have been many more instances of search technologies being acquired by content management vendors – not the other way around. This deal will give us a great deal to talk about in the next few weeks like – does this put any more pressure on Vignette to find a suitor?
Autonomy Enters ECM/WCM with Interwoven Acquisition
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Lee Dallas
Marko Sillanpää
With the acquisition of Interwoven, one wonders if Autonomy’s strategy of autonomy is over. With Verity and Virage, Autonomy has a lot of great technology for search, even Forster’s Wave analysis had them in the leader position. What they were missing was marketing.
What surprised me was that they didn’t work well with CM vendors. Yes, Verity had lost favor to newer technologies. But as part of a suite of Autonomy products, it could offer benefits to any CM platform. But no CM vendors are listed as partners, nor do they make a big deal about working with anyone else. Look at CMIS. It’s all about working together these days and Autonomy was in a good position to do so. That is until they threw down the gauntlet.
Being aligned with another CM by being acquired BY them is expected. But by acquiring a CM these days, Autonomy obviously wants to go it alone. And Interwoven was not the choice I would have made.