Over the past few years, the Enterprise Portals and Enterprise Content Management product vendor space has been witnessing an overall consolidation, through several mergers & acquisitions – noteworthy of these being IBM’s acquisition of FileNet; BEA’s acquisition of Plumtree and subsequent Oracle’s acquisition of BEA ; followed by Oracle’s acquisition of Stellent & now Sun.
In the very recent past, this trend has turned its focus to the Web Content Management (WCM) space – the past few month have witnessed the acquisition of Two of the Three leading WCM vendors – First two being Interwoven which was acquired by Autonomy & Vignette – acquired by OpenText. The third and the strongest player being FatWire.
EMC on the other hand, despite being the leader in the ECM space, has failed to extend it’s supremacy in the WCM space. As a result it has lost WCM business to these vendors, specially FatWire. While it may or may not make business sense for EMC (customers WCM are relatively quite small compared to ECM ), from a technology offering perspective, is critical for EMC to improve its offerings. While ECM can overhaul the entire product itself, bear in mind that it is know for its long Mergers & Acquisitions history (50 +). So I won’t be surprised to see EMC acquire a product in the space. With Interwoven & Vignette already acquired and no more an options, FatWire seems to be the obvious choice.
While the rumors to this context have been around and we can add to that by speculating further, we have to see if FatWire is really up for acquisition; does it make business sense for EMC to acquire FatWire; would this happen before there’s another twist in the story ….
The Web & Content Stream 