|
TELECOMS AND SOFTWARE NEWS
|
|
|
Content management consolidation continues
Sue Clarke, Mike Davis
Content management consolidation continues
Ontario-headquartered enterprise content management vendor Open Text has announced its wish to acquire fellow Canadian content management specialist Nstein. Given Open Text's track record of acquiring competitors such as Hummingbird and, latterly, Vignette, on the surface this could be seen as a bid for greater market share. However, we believe it is a strategic bid for Nstein's text mining and semantic search technologies, which will enable Open Text to continue to compete against the behemoths IBM, EMC, and Oracle, and fend off challenges from newer and smaller entrants to the ECM marketplace. Financial analysts have been positive about the proposed acquisition, put at a modest C$35 million. They regard it as delivering additional revenues from new market segments and opportunities for cost base reductions through synergies. But Open Text has acquired many vendors involved with content management over the years, and for its pain (and cost) has had to support back catalog versions of those vendors' software, while integrating the acquired technologies into its own product stack. It has not yet finished the integration of Vignette and, while it is now experienced with acquisitions, one must wonder why it keeps going through the “pain” cycle. Open Text is not just after synergies and market share
The Nstein product set includes Digital Asset Management (DAM), which is already in the Open Text portfolio. It also has a web content management tool - of which Open Text has more than enough from its acquisitions. But Nstein also provides text mining and semantic site search, and these two latter products are the defining part of the purchase, as they will greatly enhance Open Text's search capability, which (though it is decent) is not the best search capability that we have seen in an ECM platform. The Nstein Text Mining Engine (TME) automatically generates semantic (meaning-based) metadata, which, when added to the content item, makes it both easier to discover and, just as importantly, automatically link to related items of content even if the terminology used in those content items is different - such as “broken hip” and “fractured neck of femur.” It will also associate items mentioning, for example, “Jaguar” in the context of driving with “Mercedes,” but “jaguar” in the context of habitat with “lion.” Nstein Semantic Site Search (3S) is a federated search tool that can index multiple web content management systems, blog engines, and forums, and use semantics to apply meaning to the results and automatically categorize related items for navigation, even if they use different terminology. Both products can currently be sold separately, but they are complementary. Both are aimed at making websites more accessible and, more importantly, making it easier to automatically combine related content from multiple web-based sources. Open Text aims to stay ahead of the game
To be the “largest independent ECM vendor” can prove disadvantageous when big software infrastructure vendors such as IBM and Oracle can offer larger customers attractively priced “bundles” of products, and smaller vendors that don't have the costs of legacy support can come in fast, light, and cheap. Open Text knows it cannot just rely on its own or acquired companies' respective reputations and technologies to maintain and increase its market share; it must do things differently and offer more.Despite the volumes of information stored in content management systems and archives continuing to increase because of greater regulation and potential disclosure requirements, physical storage of content is no longer the major issue for the CIO. Cheaper and more efficient storage has lessened the headache. The problem now is the fast, accurate, and complete discovery and retrieval of information. That is where the TME and 3S technologies come in to play. If Open Text can integrate them well enough for existing and new customers, it should continue to fend off competitors large and small. However, this acquisition may see potential suitors enter the wings, looking for the optimum moment to make a play for Open Text itself.
About:
This article is an extract taken from Ovum's Straight Talk service. This daily email bulletin provides our expert's views and opinions on important news and events in global IT and telecoms. If you have a comment or question regarding this article then please submit your details here:
If you would like to find out more about Straight Talk please contact StraightTalk@ovum.com
If you would like to find out more about Ovum services then please click
here for details
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Search
|
|
|
|
|
Contact Us
|
|
|
Expertise
|
|
|
|
|
