IBM Makes ECM Splash With Datacap Acquisition

Thanks to the Web and the millions of applications and data sources it’s spawned, enterprises have been swamped with an untenable amount of unstructured data that doesn’t fit into convenient existing software containers.

As CIOUpdate reports, this influx of unstructured data begs for a new breed of intuitive and utilitarian enterprise content management (ECM) apps so IBM went out and bought Datacap, a prominent player in this fast-growing software sector.

The Datacap purchase will help IBM fill in some of the enterprise content management (ECM) holes left following its 2006 acquisition of ECM provider FileNet.

IT researcher Gartner’s latest ECM report found that while most companies were cutting back on new software implementations and projects for most of the past three years, ECM is one sector companies were willing to invest in, primarily because roughly 80 percent of all data in the enterprise is of the unstructured variety.

IBM today acquired Datacap, a privately held developer of enterprise content management software used to capture and distribute unstructured data from invoices, claim forms and tax returns.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) has been extremely aggressive on the merger and acquisitions front this year, picking up a variety of software companies to round its enterprise software portfolio in order to keep pace with the likes of Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL), HP (NYSE: HPQ) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) which have all done their fair share of shopping this year, too.

Read the full story at CIOUpdate:


IBM Snaps Up Datacap in ECM Play