Autonomy's acquisition of Interwoven formally closed yesterday.

When the acquisition was announced this January, some Interwoven competitors speculated that the vendor's flagship Web CMS product TeamSite would suffer and ultimately fall by the wayside amid Autonomy's otherwise enterprisey focus.

I don't think so. First of all, as Alan mentioned, Autonomy is basically a holding company, which acquired in Interwoven a vendor that was actually a roll-up player itself. This deal was about accumulating license and maintenance streams, first within Interwoven, and now with Autonomy. In these sorts of take-overs, technology "synergies" come later -- if ever at all. Autonomy will keep selling and upgrading TeamSite for as long as it generates revenues.

The bigger story here, which has thusfar garnered fewer keystrokes, is the state of Autonomy's vast OEM relationships in the wake of this acquisition. By OEM, I mean when a content management, collaboration, or portal vendor embeds a 3rd-party search engine into their tool, typically for "internal" repository search within just that application. Autonomy has a lot of deals to embed its various search tools into a variety of content management systems that compete with Interwoven's collection of products.

History suggests that big vendors do not tend to rock this boat when they want to sustain OEM revenues. To my knowledge, none of these acquisitions significantly disturbed existing OEM search deals:

• Microsoft with FAST
• Oracle with Stellent (and its nearly ubiquitous filters), and for that matter...
• Autonomy when it acquired then OEM king Verity

 

But what about the other way -- what's an ECM or WCM vendor to do when acquisitions shift the search marketplace? That's where things can get dodgy for you the customer. For example, some Stellent ECM customers followed that vendor's advice and switched from Verity to FAST. They then got a bit of a jolt when Oracle subsequently pushed its own search technology as the favored choice after it acquired Stellent.

So, let's look at what's facing current Interwoven licensees:

• WorkSite customers who got on board with the newish Vivisimo search application that the vendor promoted -- jettisoning the former Verity OEM in WorkSite -- are probably more than a little chagrined right now about the potential prospects of turning back to Autonomy technology
• TeamSite licensees who successfully wrestled with the embedded Verity SDK probably aren't keen on Autonomy's boasts to Wall Street about dropping in scads of new IDOL search licenses into that customer base
• It's not a good sign for TeamSite customers who also purchased Interwoven MetaTagger for autoclassification to now hear the Autonomy CEO talk about the wonders of IDOL's auto-tagging services

 

I suspect Autonomy will tread carefully; we'll track what happens and share what customers tell us in our formal ECM and WCM research.

In any event, I hope all the different vendors involved play it straight. Repository search is a critical function against which many system users judge any application's overall usability. When vendors fight over embedded services like search, you lose.