Today EMC announced it is to acquire XHive the Netherlands-based, XML-focused content management vendor. XHive has carved out a niche for itself serving customers in Aerospace and Manufacturing dealing with S1000D content structures. While not a large vendor, XHive certainly brings to EMC some solid technology and domain expertise in these areas.

Nevertheless, the XHive product will add yet another repository to the Documentum architecture, and will also require significant work to allow it be fully accessible in a web services environment, and to make it more user friendly. It's an interesting move for EMC, whose Documentum group has long taken pride in its own compound document management capabilities. XHive will open some new doors, but you will have to wait some time to see this particular technology set make a major impact on EMC|Documentum's architecture or market approach.