EMC Buys Captiva, Acartus

In the latest example of consolidation within the content management marketplace, EMC (Hopkinton, Mass.) has acquired information capture solutions vendor Captiva Software (San Diego) and archiving and enterprise report management vendor Acartus (Fort Collins, Colo.). Both companies had existing relationships with EMC as solution partners.

The acquisitions will foster greater integration between capture and content management solutions, such as EMC Documentum, and constitutes a step forward toward more complete enterprise content management solutions, according to Whitney Tidmarsh, vice president, content management and solutions marketing, EMC. "This is true in particular in select vertical markets where paper plays a large role, such as financial services, government and healthcare," Tidmarsh comments.

However, Captiva, which EMC acquired for approximately $275 million, will continue to serve existing customers that are not customers of EMC's other content management solutions. "We're not going to cut off the open relationship that Captiva has with other content management providers," Tidmarsh insists. "We're giving customers ongoing flexibility of choice, while at the same time providing tighter integration between capture and content management solutions."

One Throat to Choke

Toby Bell, a Chicago-based research director with Gartner (Stamford, CT), sees the acquisitions as a response to market stimulus to have all content management functionality within one product suite. Captiva's and Acartus' front-end capture and archiving capabilities, respectively, give EMC more credentials in what the analyst firm calls content-enabled vertical applications (CEVA). They also enable EMC to offer purchasers a larger solution under single management. The vendor may have faced deal-breaking demands when lacking these capabilities, Bell speculates: "IT governance or corporate policy may have said, 'If you don't own this technology, and we can't come to you as the one throat to choke, then you're not really a candidate.'"

CAPTION.BELL: The industry is demanding more functionality within one product suite, says Toby Bell, Gartner.

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Anthony O'Donnell has covered technology in the insurance industry since 2000, when he joined the editorial staff of Insurance & Technology. As an editor and reporter for I&T and the InformationWeek Financial Services of TechWeb he has written on all areas of information ... View Full Bio