Symphony Technology Group announced recently that it was acquiring Hummingbird for $465M.  This is significant in that another ECM player is being taken off the market though Wall Street thinks that the offer amount was too low.

Hummingbird has steadily been losing market position against the mainstays over the years.  Symphony might be just the right company to turn things around.  If the acquisition closes, I wouldn’t be surprised if Symphony increased Hummingbird engineering resources with their enterprise development talent in India.  This is one company that really understands enterprise engineering.

It’s going to become increasingly difficult to be a standalone ECM player with customers buying more products from less vendors — unless you have a killer SOA play.  Many companies have tried this one form or another over the years, but I think it was always an issue of timing.  The foundation of SOA in the Content Management market makes as much sense as any other solution (if not more).  Maybe Hummingbird is the company that reinvents itself with SOA?

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 1st, 2006 at 2:57 pm and is filed under Business, ECM, India, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.