EMC Purchases Documentum in Move to Broaden Content Value Base
Many of this year's mergers in the world of content technologies have been about moving content management and organization companies up the value chain to include more human-oriented publishing value with capabilities such as collaboration and content visualization. With EMC's purchase of Documentum, the trend moves to the other end of the spectrum, as EMC's storage-based approach to managing content from birth to death takes on a more human-oriented face with Documentum's wide range of user-oriented content asset management software and services. Rigorous requirements for corporate compliance have been driving EMC, Documentum and other content technology companies towards radically vertical integration of control over content capture and creation, but the wider trend is organizations becoming increasingly aware of their roles as publishing entities that need to maximize the value of their content while still allowing content creators a great deal of flexibility and choice in the publishing process. The move is a coup for EMC, which can now position themselves aggressively against vertically aligned players such as IBM across a very wide range of core enterprise publishing, storage and retrieval requirements. It's ambitious, but positioned with the right eye towards a well-integrated approach that really addresses institutional requirements.