Yesterday IBM clarified its ECM intentions via a series of analyst briefings. In short the recently acquired FileNet P8 product will become Big Blue's main ECM offering, although legacy IBM products will remain supported for the foreseeable future. The latest version of P8 (version 4) is certainly a powerful solution for buyers of large-scale ECM systems and will benefit over time with the absorption of other IBM products, for example in enterprise search. The speed of the acquisition and integration of the ECM team (read all the old FileNet team) has been impressive, and the company says it now has 1200 developers dedicated to ECM development. The ECM space will surely see more acquisitions, but the market has already bifurcated into business solutions providers and ECM platform players. The rational buyer might chose a platform first (Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, or EMC) and then chose specific applications -- but with the platform vendors also dipping their toes into the solutions market with varying degrees of success, meeting the strategic needs of the enterprise and the shorter-term needs of the business remains a difficult task in the current ECM market.