Stellent buy divides the ECM market

The content management market has further consolidated with Oracle’s acquisition of Stellent. It comes at the end of a busy year in which OpenText acquired Hummingbird and IBM acquired FileNet.

With the imminent launch of SharePoint 2007, Microsoft will be jostling for a share of the ECM space alongside Oracle and IBM. As giants start to trample over their patch, it wouldn’t be surprising if smaller, specialist players such as Vignette and Interwoven started to feel a bit nervous. But are they bothered?

The answer, according to Larry Warnock, chief marketing officer of Vignette, is a firm, “No.” Warnock’s view is that the market is dividing into two distinct segments. “One of those is more enterprise-class solutions that are highly tuned to vertical industry problems.” The other consists of companies offering basic content services. This is the segment that the big players are fighting over.

In Warnock’s view, Oracle’s acquisition of Stellent is a response to Microsoft’s Sharepoint 7 launch. “What’s right below a basic content repository is a database. Oracle isn’t comfortable by saying all the basic content repositories should be in Sharepoint, which therefore means it’s in an SQL server.”

Max Carnecchia, president of Interwoven, responded equally philosophically. “Different types of content-centric processes and content applications require various flavours of capabilities that cannot be acquired from a single provider.”

Dave Gingell, vice president of Documentum, said: “ECM has become a core part of infrastructure. The big players that are relied on by the large corporates are being looked at to say, ‘What’s your strategy here? How do we manage the unstructured information in your environment?’”