Autonomy to swallow up Interwoven... (updated)

..... but will it choke on it ?

Hopefully not.... UPDATE - see this CMSWatch post: What next for Interwoven?

Kas asks some good questions in this post, so I wont regurgitate it here - I note my comments to his posting though - A big part of Autonomy is its Virage 'rich media management' product offerings. To me this would seem to fit very nicely with Interwoven's MediaBin Digital Asset Management (DAM) offering. So if you can manage, and search rich media assets, what else do you need, yep a Web CMS so that you can publish them. So, while agree that Autonomy might not leap right pouring money into updating the rather ancient underpinnings of the Interwoven WCM line, hopefully it will 'do the right thing' and update it as part of a 'full lifecycle' digital asset / rich media product line up - which pretty much answers my own question at the bottom of the original post below - yep Autonomy may well become a fully blow ECM vendor.

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Since I heard about this early this morning, I have been trying to find time to do some analysis and blog on it, but to be honest Alan Pelz-Sharpe pretty much nails it (as per usual) with his commentary over at CMS Watch here: http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/1481-Autonomy-acquires-Interwoven---A-first-take

Some others I have chatted with today make the same point as Alan, that Interwoven's TeamSite has always been big in the legal sector, and thats a key 'discovery' market for Autonomy, so in some respects the deal makes sense. However in others it does not; e.g. Autonomy picked up Meridio last year, and there is considerable overlap with between their EDRM facilities and some of the features provided by Interwoven.

Sometimes Autonomy appears to be the British IBM - I am fairly sure it makes more money on its consulting and services revenue stream than it does on the licences for the IDOL platform, indeed Alan characterises it as a 'holding company'.

However with enterprise search, e-discovery, EDRM and now Web Content Management and Digital Asset Management solutions in its pocket, do we reqard Autonomy as one of the main ECM players, challenging EMC, IBM and OpenText ?

For sure it will be interesting to keep an eye on this......

Autonomy press release

Interwoven press release

Autonomy to purchase Meridio

So here's a consolidation story that took me by surprise !

I am sure anyone from Autonomy will have told your that they are 'more than just a search company' for quite some time, but their agreement to purchase Meridio really confirms that. If you don't know Meridio, their chief product is an electronic document and records management suite.

Now I have never used their product, but they did form part of a bid for the OU ECMS some 2 and a half years ago, and as Meridio are squarely .Net and MS Gold Partner, it formed the guts of the solution with Sharepoint 2003 providing the front end. It was a messy architecture and to be honest after a demo, a couple of us decided if we were confused at which interface we were using at one point in time (and could not figure out which system the metadata was actually in) then the average end user was not going to stand a chance ! I am sure their current version is much better ......

So, Autonomy do deals with MS to integrate their search with Sharepoint (MOSS 07) and then get their hands on an eDRM system with a long history of Sharepoint integration, so I guess they also see Sharepoint as a mile long, ten thousand tonne 'CP Freight train' thats not going to hit the buffers anytime soon !