IBM's Aggressive Content Stance: Bypassing the Office Content Bottleneck
SearchDatabase.com notes that IBM's strong position in content management across a wide array of products gives it a claimed 34 percent share of the content management marketplace, not including its most recent acquisition of Green Pasture Software. While the obvious targets of this strategy are companies such as FileNet and Documentum, it's clear that IBM has a much broader focus that takes in the likes of Microsoft, which continues to struggle with content management as a sophisicated, scalable component in its .NET framework. Without that key component, content that used to be authored in Microsoft Office applications will gradually take its original form in content managment repositories, where it's more easily repurposed for multiple audiences. Microsoft does its best to keep up with the content management movement, and has components such as InfoPath can help to facilitate independence from heavy software, but those that have the least to lose from established desktop software revenues are the ones most likely to move aggressively into content authoring and management environments that are in line with today's more efficient institutional publishing environments.