Goodbye Interwoven
Yesterday it was the unexpected expected news in the ECM World: Autonomy buys Interwoven.
It was expected. Interwoven was one of the few left stand-alone players in the ECM market. Vignette is the best known remainder in the sea of ECM fishes. Compared to Interwoven, their outlook for 2009 wasn’t that good. They also cancelled their annual user conference. It makes you wonder if they’ll survive. Let’s wait and see.
It was unexpected as in that it wasn’t obvious that it would be Autonomy to drop by and pick it up.
Wait and see also applies to Interwoven. What will Autonomy do with their new toys? Time will tell but these are my thoughts.
Having developed with Interwoven TeamSite a few years a go and having worked with both MediaBin and WorkSite, I do understand that Autonomy is interested in WorkSite. It has a dominant position in Legal and the Governance Risk Compliance area is where Autonomy already was growing stronger and stronger. Product and customer base are worth the deal for Autonomy.
MediaBin, a digital asset management solution, does fit in that area too. Think of the link between media, rights management, legal and retrieving that content through a search engine… Again customer base is interesting. Not so sure about the product.
TeamSite, a Web Content Management solution, is to me the odd bit of the deal. I know TeamSite as a strong WCM solution and on pure stand-alone WCM a strong compatitor to e.g. Documentum and FileNet.
With Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0 moving steadily from the tech savy to the masses and Open Source solutions like Drupal, Joomla and Alfresco as well as MOSS 2007, I found it more and more difficult to get my head around what the new WCM tooling should look like. This move doesn’t make that job easier 
I’ve been reading many blogs the past 24 hours that do say something about this acquisation. For me 2 stand out in case you want to read more. One is “Autonomy Acquires Interwoven – What It Means For Search” by Leslie Owens of Forrester. The other is “Autonomy acquires Interwoven – A first take” by Alan Pelz-Sharpe from CMS Watch.
