Documentum and IBM increase RM abilities
Documentum and IBM increase RM abilities
Two records management application vendors slipped under the umbrella of larger players last night and signalled that records management is on the radar of large corporations.
"These acquisitions will force the enterprise content management (ECM) competitors to address records management head on."
Documentum has acquired fellow American company TrueArc, whilst IBM has signed a "definitive agreement" to acquire all the assets of Tarian Software.
Documentum and TrueArc have recently been certified by the American Department of Defence for electronic records keeping. The integrated solution consists of the Documentum ECM platform and the ForeMost Enterprise solution from TrueArc and has passed the (DoD) 5015.2 standard. A joint statement from both announced both the certification and the acquisition.
IBM and Tarian expect the acquisition to be completed by the end of the fourth 2002 quarter. As yet full details of the deal have not been disclosed, Brett Vincent, the regional sales manager for data management software at the Australian IBM branch office said the deal is currently going through due-diligence.
Nicholas Wilkoff of Forrester Research said that Documentum and IBM will use these acquisitions to show that they can support American records management standards such as 5015.2. Both Tarian and TrueArc's application carry certification.
"Records management vendors like Tower Software have won multi-million dollar deals with government clients," said Mr Wilkoff. He said content management application vendors need to consider the records management market. "Content management vendors like Interwoven, FileNet and Stellent have been focused on features like portal integration, repository integration and collaboration. These acquisitions will force the enterprise content management (ECM) competitors to address records management head on." He added, "ECM competitors should consider partnerships with pure-play records management vendors like Tower Software or systems integrators like EDS that focus on data management to government clients." EDS is a global reseller of Tower Software's TRIM product (read story).
Mr Vincent of IBM said that enterprise content management has been a huge growth area for the industry giant.
"Tarian gives us a front end for ECM. It will become an integral part of our e-commerce suit, we are putting our weight behind the solution", he said. Adding, "We believe we got the most competitive solution."
IBM will integrate Tarian into the open standards platform, including storage offerings. Nick Redshaw, the business unit executive for data management solutions in the Asia Pacific region said records related demand for storage solutions "continues to be one the fastest growing parts of the market."
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