Interwoven fights back

In the content management space the debate over the future of Vignette and Interwoven has raged for many years. A flurry of acquisitions in the last two years has seen the market consolidate down to around six major players: IBM, EMC Documentum, Oracle, Opentext, Microsoft and HP - all of which have particular strengths in particular verticals, or functionality which will make them appeal to certain companies over others.
And then there's Interwoven and Vignette, sitting rather uncomfortably sometimes in the middle. While IBM built its products around its background in business process management, imaging and storage, and OpenText's focus is governance, risk and compliance, the two smaller vendors historically approached ECM from the web content management side.
Both have been commonly talked-about as acquisition targets for one of the bigger vendors, given the sound technology solutions they produce, and it's possible that they've been saved so far thanks to SAP's notoriously acquisition-shy behaviour. It would seem crazy that the German software giant doesn't make a move in this space soon though, allowing as it has its archest rival Oracle to shoot ahead in the content management stakes with functionality it acquired with Stellent.
In the meantime then, Vignette has sought to stave off any potential approaches by concentrating on its core competency in the web, adding greater social media and personalisation capabilities. Interwoven meanwhile has been a bit more quiet, bagging an acquisition in the web optimisation space and enhancing current products.
And now it has sought to expand it capabilities into the rapidly growing e-discovery market with an announcement to acquire Discovery Mining, a firm specialising in solutions which streamline the process of discovering e-data relating to litigation. The move makes more than just financial sense - Forrester predicts the north American market alone for e-discovery will more than triple by 2011 to over $4billion - because Interwoven is already strong in the legal space. And with a strong thumbs up in Gartner's recent MarketScope report for the WCM space, the firm seems to be doing a pretty good job of keeping the vultures at bay.