I had lunch with someone in December who forecasted that only four viable partners will exist in the Content/Document Management space in the near future:

* EMC w/Documentum and Captiva

* IBM w/ its acquisition of FileNet

* Microsoft with MOSS

* Alfresco (because it is Open Source)

Now with EMC and Microsoft making announcements about their deepening ties (this press release from last October)
AU.news, will there soon be four players but only three competitors?

EMC has announced a preview of the features that Documentum 6 will have and two of them are Microsoft-related (This from their site) EMC.com

* Work anywhere - Documentum Client for Outlook will come with offline support to allow people to work in a disconnected mode with subsequent intelligent repository synchronization.

* Collaborative content management - Documentum 6 platform includes the collaboration capabilities of our award-winning eRoom product line embedded into the core Documentum architecture as well as an enhanced set of federated searching capabilities. The next-generation integrations with SharePoint 2007 and Office 2007 will be native to the Microsoft applications.

What does this mean to you?

Corporate behemoths almost always adapt or win; changes in technology at this level seldom affect their livelihood. But if you're a developer, engineer, administrator or architect in this space, does it increase or decrease the value of your expertise? Will you eventually need to hop over or straddle the fence? Since Documentum most often exists in highly-regulated spaces (which are usually slow with change) there"s no need to panic, but is there a need to prepare?

If you're a vendor like Vorsite (who on January 17 announced a MOSS search connector for Documentum Vorsite.com ), what does this mean to you (especially when Google and Yahoo now offer enterprise-level Documentum searches)?

I've invited Vorsite to blog on this site. If they do, I'm interested in their value proposition.

I'm also interested in the theory of IT business partnerships. Is the rule "We will partner with you to provide a value-add for our customers UNTIL we're able to develop our own, reliable value-add?"

It's just business right?