Content Management Matters ™

Iron Mountain Europe, a records management and storage services provider, announced the acquisition of Anamnis GDM SAS, a firm specializing in electronic document management solutions.

Video sharing site Vidavee, most famously known for working on video integration with The Huffington Post, has been acquired by enterprise CMS provider Vignette. This move comes after a large demand by Vignette's customers to provide rich media integration.

The announcement also comes fresh off the heels of Vignette's announcement of their Web Experience Platform.

Giunti have a pretty impressive track record when it comes to educational materials - in 1841, Alessandro and Felice Paggi set up the printing and publishing company Giunti Editore in Florence, specialising in the publication of school textbooks and books for children and young people.

Giunti have continued in the same tradition up to the present day, but with modern refinements, and Giunti Labs is now one of Europe’s leading e-learning and mobile content management solution providers.

So it is interesting to hear that Giunti Labs has acquired the Australian federated digital repository system HarvestRoad®.

Global Information Management Solution Provider SDL has announced the acquisition of Idiom Technologies Inc for $21.7m USD (£11.1m*) plus $4.9m USD (£2.5m*) worth of debt and working capital.

Founded in 1998, Idiom Technologies Inc. provides Translation management systems as Software as a Service (SaaS). Their product WorldServer is used by over 60 leading global companies worldwide.

DVT, a business software solution provider from South Africa, has acquired a 66.7% stake in Offline Digital, a content management developer.

Tricom Document Management, a company that specializes in the electronic management of legacy and current documents for a global clientèle, has completed its acquisition of Apex Document Solutions, a full service national provider of litigation support services for legal professionals.

Stop the press! Sun Microsystems, that little company that brought us Java, the Solaris OS and a bucket load of other things, has made a bold plunge into the enterprise database market. They have announced the acquisition of the privately held open source database vendor MySQL for a whopping US $1 billion.

Seems Oracle is on a buying spree these days. It announced the purchase of document capture solution provider, Captivation right on the heels of it's acquisition of BEA Systems for $8.5 billion. Put these two things together and it's obvious Oracle is a mission to be numero uno in the industry.

Six Apart has sold LiveJournal to Russian media group SUP for an undisclosed sum. SUP has established a U.S.-based company, LiveJournal Inc., which will manage the worldwide operations of the popular blogging and social networking brand.

Not all M&A's are reason to celebrate. Sometimes they happen guns a-blazing. We get the feeling Oracle's attempt to acquire BEA Systems will be just that kind of socially awkward cold war-type thing.

Last Wednesday, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison announced that a future takeover bid for BEA Systems will be less than the US$ 7 billion it was willing to pay last month. He pointed to the stock price and coolly added, "Clearly the $17 price seems too high now."

US$ 17 per share was the valuation of Oracle's initial takeover bid. But Ellison's comment is also an acknowledgment of the downturn in value for a number of tech stocks, which hit Oracle hard, according to the Financial Times. BEA's shares have enjoyed a safe plateau as its shareholders anticipate a fresh bid from Oracle.

Last month Oracle's offer to buy BEA was rejected because it "undervalued the company." But Ellison remains grimly optimistic, adding at its recent SF-based annual financial analyst meeting, "It looks like no one [else] is going to buy BEA. We were the only buyer then."

There has been plenty of discussion recently about the consolidation of the web analytics marketplace due to the Omniture/Visual Sciences deal, and some comments on my last posting speculating about the future of Coremetrics and WebTrends.

IBM has announced that it is to acquire business intelligence and performance management provider Cognos in a US$ 5 bn deal. Big Blue will pay US$ 58 per share for the publicly listed Ottawa company, which will be integrated as a group within IBM's Information Management Software division. The deal is expected to be ratified by Cognos' shareholders within weeks.

Dutch Enterprise CMS firm Morningstar Systems, which specializes in the integration of third-party Enterprise CMS products for customers, has been purchased by the IRIS group. They will fork over €2.6m in cash up front and make further payments over the next two years, dependent on the performance of the acquisition over that period. The final price is expected to be 5-7 times Morningstar's EBIT, which is pretty much fair dinkum. Morningstar turned over 3 million euros in 2006, and as of yesterday, IRIS owns the whole kit and kaboodle.

No one's safe from the M&A bug. UK firm Autonomy has just agreed to purchase Belfast-based Meridio for US$ 40.8 million.

Meridio is a global provider of enterprise document and records management software. Earlier this month, it updated its proprietary offering for easier integration with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) and MS Exchange.

Not a bad relationship for its new parent company to inherit.

Understanding that a vendor has to do more than just label its WCM solution industry-leading, FatWire goes the acquisition route and adds the extensive Web 2.0 capabilities of the relativelly obscure Infostoria.