IBM's proposed acqusition of Filenet and OpenText's acqusition of Hummingbird demonstrate that the enterprise content management (ECM) space is consolidating. As in other markets, the number of independent vendors is diminishing as the big infrastructure players like BEA, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP acquire and develop new products and barge their way into new markets. The infrastructure vendors are bringing together content management, search, collaboration, portals and process management to create what can be thought of as a knowledge management platform. I guess knowledge management is still a dirty word in many organizations. I think at one time to overcome this issue, Gartner added business intelligence to this mix and created the concept of the smart enterprise suite. Like many Gartner buzzwords it has fallen by the wayside.

The challenge for companies like IBM and OpenText is integrating products and dealing with overlapping function. IBM particularly has a challenge here. It has a bewildering number of options for content management, search, and rules management. In many cases, large vendors just see what products stick and gather revenue from their overlapping products. Computer Associates has used this model for years. The problem for the customer is wading through this morass to determine what products to buy and what ones are likely to survive.