Reuters is reporting that there are talks that Microsoft is interested in making a bid for Autonomy. Both companies are not commenting about this yet, but apparently the market is excited about it and Autonomy’s stock enjoyed a boost.
What could this mean for the ECM market? It would be bigger than Open Text’s acquisition of Hummingbird in 2006, as both companies were solidly in the ECM space already. But this is different. Could Microsoft integrate Autonomy’s EDRM sprectrum with SharePoint, with everything indexed by IDOL? Could all of this functionality be built into an OS? When I sat in on an early peek at Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 earlier this year, I took note that Microsoft is actually starting to use the phrase “ECM” in their presentations. Maybe this was foreshadowing. We’ll have to see how this story ends.