Feature
This article provides some additional context to the recent acquisition of Australian IDM player Tower Technology by the American ECM vendor Vignette. Below are key extracts. From vnunet.com by Martin Veitch Many of the mergers and acquisitions are being driven by the need to comply with regulations such as data protection rules, Basel 2, industry codes of conduct and the US Sarbanes-Oxley Act, intended to improve corporate governance. But the need to find a fit between managing data held in web sites, emails, paper and electronic documents would be pressing even without such rules. ... Tower will add document capture capabilities to the skills Vignette has picked up through two other recent acquisitions - collaboration tools supplier Intraspect and portals maker Epicentric. When you look at the way a web site is developed, document capture is one of the largest aspects you need... ... Unusually, the acquisition may initially have most impact here in the UK. Although an Australian firm, Tower makes about half of its revenue in Europe and most of its customers are UK blue-chips. ... "This marks the continuation of the rapid consolidation of the enterprise content management market and lifts Vignette back into a contender position in the market," wrote analyst firm Ovum. "This acquisition rounds out Vignette's product offering, in terms of technology at least. [The deal provides Vignette] with the pieces to compete alongside Filenet, OpenText and Documentum. It will also significantly strengthen Vignette's position against mid-tier players such as Stellent and Interwoven." ... Eddie Short, director of consultancy Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, said the combination promises to help buyers move towards a united management solution. "We see the move to a single content management solution as the goal," Short said. "The aim is a single repository of content. Underneath you want a modern architecture that is pure XML, and this a way to get there." Read.
