Interwoven Announces Definitive Agreement to be Acquired by Autonomy
Well it wasn’t a shock that Interwoven would get taken over in 2009, there were plenty of rumours indicating this was likely to happen. What was a shock is the company who has bought them. I’d heard from sources at other well known document management system vendors talk about it being HP or Oracle, as neither had a foothold in this market. But Autonomy, that was out of the blue.
No doubt in a lot of law firms right now there are a raft of questions doing the rounds.
What does this mean for IUS (Interwoven Universal Search)? Doesn’t this compete with Autonomy’s products?
Where does Velocity fit into the long term WorkSite plans as the indexing/searching engine?
Will WorkSite v8.5 get delayed as Autonomy’s search engine gets integrated?
Ultimately will the niche document management product (WorkSite) get sidelined for Interwoven’s other offerings?
No answers yet.
Actually reading some of the press release (http://is.gd/gOMt) in more detail makes me think this could be good for legal.
e.g. some quotes from it:
“The Acquisition will strengthen Autonomy’s access to the worldwide legal and compliance industry through Interwoven’s significant sales force with industry expertise”
“Interwoven Company Highlights: De facto standard for Legal Document Management”
“The combination of the two companies will redefine how global 2000 corporations, leading law firms…”
“customers already in place, including Bank of America, Bayer, Deutsche Bank, DLA Piper, Shell, Tesco and White & Case.”
That’s a lot of comment on what you could consider a small vertical market. So maybe the legal market will get a lot more of the new companies focus?
Perhaps I ought to edit the post!!
Another interesting peice is Autonomy bought Verity in 2005 which was the original pre WorkSite 8.3 indexer.
Back to Verity with 8.5 then?
I think this is v interesting. I don’t see how Velocity can be sidelined. At a recent product roadmap demo I saw, Velocity was going to replace ALL search in ALL Interwoven products, the WCM products too. I think there’s been too much commitment to making Velocity work, and too much good feedback from the client base for Autonomy (or Verity…) to be considered.
I could not see one search vendor using anothers technology in one of their products, irrespective of the level of commitment. Having seen Auotnomy’s offerings its rare they ever use third party offerings.