Blink and you might have missed it, but Symantec signed an important OEM (original equipment manufacturer) deal with Autonomy the other day that was announced with little fanfare. However, it's an important deal, and here's why...

Symantec has long wanted to play in the content management sector, for just like EMC they see content management as an excellent feeder for and extension of their broader storage and archiving business. Their first steps came with the ingestion of KVS's Enterprise Vault archiving product into their portfolio. Since that time Symantec has seen growth and potential for their archiving (mainly e-mail focused) business. This potential is driven in part by the fashion for e-discovery in the US (due to new federal rules), but more broadly by server and storage optimization demand for Exchange environments.

The deal with Autonomy could allow Symantec to play much more broadly in the content technologies market place. Firstly by boosting their search capabilities (currently supplied via an old relationship with Alta Vista) and potentially bringing them into broader archiving situations (SharePoint) via products such as Meridio. Symantec is a very well known brand, and they currently hold a strong position in the EAM (e-mail archiving and management) sector. With the Autonomy deal, they could begin to make an impact elsewhere -- to their benefit as well as Autonomy's, who remains associated almost exclusively with its search technology.

I suspect that this arrangement is more than a simple OEM deal, that it is strategic in nature to Symantec's broader archiving and ECM ambitions. That over the coming year we will see Symantec start to appear more and more as key player alongside EMC, Oracle and HP (who recently acquired Tower), in an ECM market that is becoming increasingly focused on archiving, imaging, and compliance.