Maybe now IBM has a
complete content-management suite.
The vendor, which has been pushing what it called an end-to-end
enterprise content-management product line, made its third software
acquisition in that arena in just over a year on Wednesday, scooping up
privately held Green Pasture Software Inc. to further bolster its
content-management product line. Financial details weren't disclosed.
Green Pasture Software's core product, called G5, tracks the
information sources used to assemble compound documents consisting of
multiple content elements, such as text, images, computer-aided design
drawings, spreadsheets and financial tables, and multimedia files. The
software immediately will become part of IBM's content-management product
line, a segment of its DB2 Information Management suite. IBM similarly
adopted technologies obtained from its November 2002 acquisition of
records-management vendor Tarian Software Inc. and its July purchase of
Web content-management vendor Aptrix.
While the Green Pasture acquisition is likely a modest one in terms of
dollar value, Delphi Group analyst Hadley Reynolds says the string of
acquisitions sends a clear signal to other vendors about IBM's strategy in
the enterprise content-management market. "If anybody thought that IBM
wasn't serious about coming after FileNet and Documentum, this cements
that story," says Reynolds. "They've bought their way into a pretty
competitive position." Reynolds says that prior to the acquisitions, IBM's
content-management product line was weak because of a lack of functional
applications to complement its content infrastructure products, most
notably its DB2 Content Manager repository.
Meta Group projects enterprise content-management to be a $9 billion
market by 2007, and analysts expect IBM and other infrastructure vendors
to move aggressively to capture as much of that market as possible.
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