I don’t usually blog about press releases but the news today from Tikit is worth a post. It’s been quite a year in the document management world (looking back at my last few posts, there are a higher proportion of DM posts than anything else), and today Tikit announce  they have signed a global partnership agreement with NetDocuments.

From a purely commercial sense as a reseller it seems an obvious move, there are likely to be more new installations for NetDocuments, simply because most folks have already got iManage and if you’re moving the only alternative is ND. I suspect resellers make more from new sales than ongoing support costs. Also there are many competitors in the iManage reseller, services and support space and not so much in the ND space, so first to a new market and all that.

Does it change anything for iManage customers? Probably not. But it offers a bit of validation that ND has moved into the space of #1 challenger in the DM space. As the world moves to a SaaS/cloud/hosted model it will be good to have two companies vying for business to accelerate development.

For Tikit it gives comfort that they are still  pushing in legal, though when I heard rumours of a press release this morning my initial hope was to follow iManage’s lead and an MBO from BT 🙂

A few lines from the Tikit release:

This new partnership, which makes Tikit the first Global Premier Partner for NetDocuments, is a continuation of our strategy of offering choice to the market and offering customers the best of emerging technologies from existing and new partners across the world.

Our product roadmaps will remain the same, but integration with NetDocuments will shortly be available for our products, TMS and eMS. As always, we will continue to invest in our own products, making sure they are kept up-to-date, to deliver what our clients and the market wants and needs.