The consolidation continues. Oracle bought Enterprise Content Integration (ECI) vendor Context Media. IBM also signed an agreement to buy another data integration vendor DWL after it bought ECI vendor Venetica earlier.
These ECI vendors served an important niche. If a customer had multiple ECM systems, they could invest in a good ECI product and marry disparate ECM repositories. However, if vendors like IBM and Oracle start bundling these ECI products as part of their CM offerings, it will be difficult for customers to use these ECI products with their other ECM products without buying IBM or Oracle. These products tie in closely with many ECM products (Documentum, Interwoven etc) and with IBM and Oracle buying these, I see a conflict of interest. If IBM (or Oracle) has to promote these, it would have to acknowledge the existence of other ECM products and will have to accept co-existance. This, IMHO is against their basic nature of gaining market share!
On another note, It would also be interesting to see how JSR 170 fares now. Would these vendors have an incentive to make their repositories JSR 170 compliant so that it is easier for companies to integrate different repositories and there is no need at all to use ECI vendors?