Anyone who has watched Documentum and EMC as companies knows that much of their innovation and many of their successes have come as a result of their spotting and acquiring companies with complementary, leading-edge technologies and then integrating them into their offerings.

Need examples? eRoom was once its own company, separate from Documentum. PDF Aqua was developed by Computerized Document Control, later known as CDC Solutions.

So what does this say for the Documentum and Captiva now that they've been acquired by EMC? Similar integration, we're sure. In fact we have already heard some say that Documentum is irrelevant without Captiva. This should delight EMC whose tagline is "EMC - Where Information Lives."

Pretty soon Documentum will be to EMC Software as eRoom is to Documentum. This is, of course, not a bad thing, just different.

So, if you're wondering what kind of impact EMC Software/Documentum's most recent acquisition will have, take a good look at its latest acquisition, xHive

When I began recruiting Documentum folks in 1993, Documentum was a known as Electronic Document Management Systems software. Simply stated, it was a technology that added structure to unstructured data.

The "data" lived in documents that were either electronically stored just after creation or that were scanned in for electronic storage. My early clients were Life Science firms who used Documentum to improve the speed and accuracy with which New Drug Applications were delivered to the FDA- these same submissions can now be sent electronically, in their entirety. They used to take seven years of administrative preparation and two automobile trunk-fulls of paper to transport.

Imagine how unburdened the submissions folks felt when they found out software was available to reduce the drudgery of manually entering critical content.