Open Text to purchase Ixos

Open Text last week agreed to purchase fellow enterprise content management (ECM) software firm Ixos. The move continues the trend for consolidation in the sector, which may force IT buyers to look away from smaller vendors when considering how best to control structured content and unstructured data such as web pages, emails and scanned documents.

"Size does matter and this means we hack it on size," said Nick Ellis, UK managing director of Ixos. "It's complementary as Open Text is known for collaboration and ECM and document management whereas Ixos is known for archiving and content management."

In a research note, analyst company Ovum said the combination would "have a huge impact... opening up a further gap between the market leaders and the mid-tier players... It will certainly be cause for concern for long-standing market leaders Documentum and FileNet."

However, the developments may pose difficulties for some customers, as both Open Text and Ixos have made several acquisitions in recent months, and must decide which products to keep and integrate.

"In the medium term [changes will be necessary] but we've been fairly acquisitive in the past and have done a good job of evolving [our acquired technologies] into a common platform," said Bill Forquer, Open Text vice president of marketing.

The Open Text-Ixos deal followed just a week after storage giant EMC agreed to buy Documentum. These and related moves - IBM, Microsoft and Oracle are all attempting to advance their positions in ECM - may push other content management companies into mergers to compete on scale. That could include not just FileNet and other traditional content management companies but also some vendors that made their reputations in web content management, such as Vignette and Interwoven.

However, some content management firms remain convinced that a more focused approach with improved collaboration capabilities will win out.

"There's been a huge amount of flux in the ECM market but it's how you deliver information that is important," commented David Thorpe, Vignette's business strategy director. "A library book on the shelf has little interest but a book that you're reading does have interest."