EMC to Acquire Documentum for $1.7 Billion

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EMC Tuesday set the stage for adding a crucial new piece to its strategy of building a complete information lifecycle management (ILM) portfolio with its bid to acquire Documentum for $1.7 billion in stock.

ILM is the concept of managing stored data from its inception until its disposal, or “cradle to grave,” as many analysts have termed the concept. EMC has been mining this front for the last year and made its first significant acquisition to fill in gaps in its ILM suite earlier this year when it purchased data archiving specialist Legato Systems for $1.3 billion.

But analysts have said one of the ILM aspects Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC has been lacking is enterprise content management (ECM), a gap it will fill should its bid to purchase Documentum be successful. Pleasanton, Calif.-based Documentum is a leading provider of enterprise content management software and competes with Hummingbird and FileNet.

Enterprise content management software allows companies to manage their unstructured content, which includes anything from electronic documents such as Web pages and spreadsheets to medical records and audio/video content.

Documentum’s ECM platform consists of automated document management, records management, Web content management, digital asset management, and collaboration (acquired through the purchase of eRoom late last year) in a single content platform. EMC hopes Documentum’s software will add a necessary management ingredient to its data protection, storage management, and information management software and storage platforms.

Enterprise Storage Group analyst Brian Babineau believes that although EMC did acquire some ECM capabilities with Legato, the purchase of Documentum is the “next logical move up the food chain in application and records management.”

“It’s an important piece for EMC to be able to control content and make sure it ends up on the hardware platform, ” Babineau told internetnews.com. “Even if not, it’s a hedge against the commodity hardware market.”

Of all the players in the space, why did EMC go for Documentum? Documentum’s specialty is the biopharmaceutical industry, considered to be a considerable
growth sector in the future, Babineau said. “Documentum has a huge content management market share there.”

EMC President and CEO Joe Tucci summed up what he thought was a recipe for success on a conference call when he said that EMC, Documentum, and LEGATO have collectively achieved a combined total of more than $2 billion in software license and support revenues in the most recent 12 months.

“Documentum enables organizations to organize and manage their growing volumes of unstructured data by leveraging knowledge about that data — information about information,” Tucci said.

EMC’s relationship with Documentum stretches back to April 2002, when Documentum’s platform was integrated with EMC’s content-addressed storage (CAS) Centera product platform under the EMC Developers Program. EMC intends to operate Documentum as a software division of EMC when the deal closes. It will remain headquartered in Pleasanton and will be led by Documentum CEO Dave DeWalt.

Under terms of the agreement, Documentum stockholders will receive 2.175 shares of EMC stock for each share of Documentum stock. The acquisition is expected to be completed in the first quarter of calendar year 2004. Upon the deal’s completion, EMC expects to take a charge in the quarter that the transaction is closed for the value of Documentum’s in-process research and development costs and other integration expenses.

Story courtesy of Internet News.

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Clint Boulton
Clint Boulton
Clint Boulton is an Enterprise Storage Forum contributor and a senior writer for CIO.com covering IT leadership, the CIO role, and digital transformation.

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