After months of speculations, FileNet finally got acquired. And it was not Oracle, as some rumors suggested but IBM who acquired it.
This might change the game for some customers. I suspect it’ll be a long time before IBM actually rationalizes the two product lines (if at all they decide to do it) and hence customers will still need to consider both products (IBM and FileNet) in their evaluations. In some of the evaluations, IBM was ahead of FileNet because of factors like market presence and so on. However, this difference will go away now. Secondly, I know some customers who were actually considering both these products and I suspect they will just postpone their plans till a clearer picture emerges.
The other interesting thing would be how FileNet’s partners figure in the whole scheme of things. FileNet has alliances with HP, MS, BEA and Sun. Interestingly, IBM is not mentioned in their list of partners 
I have not seen too many ECM products with decent delivery capabilities. I hope this deal will change this with a tighter integration between Websphere portal server and FileNet.
And finally, like in the portals space, there’s one less pure play ECM vendor now and the Infrastructure brigade marches on. I think HP, Sun and Oracle will be forced to make a move in this space sooner than later. There are quite a few targets - Fatwire, Interwoven, Stellant and Vignette. Seth has a list of possibilities here. What’s your guess?
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