IBM's Filenet acquisition ... today's pressures and future growth in content management

CNet headline today: IBM to pay $1.6 billion for FileNet

The acquisition price of $35 per FileNet share is only a slight premium over the closing price of FileNet's stock on Wednesday.

The low premium IBM paid for Filenet demonstrates Filenet's vulnerability. Filenet is being squeezed between Documentum at the high end of ECM/ILM (Enterprise Content Management, and Information Lifecycle Management), and Microsoft Sharepoint's rapid growth into ECM/ILM from team sites and portals.  

 

But this  looks like a necessary move for IBM too.  The squeeze for IBM is that  Documentum drives mostly Oracle today (but SQL Server in future) and WSS/SPS drives SQL Server. Hence, Filenet will be a necessary stimulant for (or defence of) IBM's DB2 business:

IBM said that it will integrate FileNet's products with its own content-management software developed in its Information Management division, which is led by general manager Ambuj Goyal.

IBM also mentioned that they might integrate Filenet with Websphere Process Server

 

... IBM said it will seek to combine FileNet's content-management software with its business process management tools for automating complex business workflows

 

No mention of Lotus integration, although managed documents are almost always the result of collaborative teams.  I think IBM's plans for Filenet illuminate a major differenec in perspective between IBM and Microsoft . Will ECM/ILM  growth come from enterprise storage decisions, as IBM apparently expects, or will it be driven by end users and teams who actually create the documenst to be managed?

 

Comments

[russ stalters]

Hi Cliff,

Long time since we've chatted. I have enjoyed some of your posts.

Anyway, I think the demand and growth for ECM/ILM will still be driven by the business users and content creators.

It will be interesting to see if I am right but my expeience has been that folks responsible for the storage infrastructure are not thinking about content management strategies from an enterprise perspective.