Yes, we've reached that phase in the market cycle for compliance-related products and services where the vendors start climbing in bed with each other. And that's a good thing. No, really!

We've known all along that the ability to set and enforce data use policies across an enterprise, on records and documents and even idle chit-chat, spanning everything spreadsheets to instant messages, well. . .that was going to take a lot of vendors working together or some heavy lifting by internal developers, or both.The summer is winding down, the auditing season is winding up and the vendors are starting the mating dances. We saw where Vignette Corp. and Certus Software have got together to provide a Sarbanes-Oxley compliance application with a records management backbone, enabling lifecycle management of critical compliance information. They've married a compliance framework with records managment.

That's a pretty interesting idea, in fact, so interesting that Global 360 decided to do something very similar. In this case, Global 360 said it will market BWise's governance and internal control software in conjunction with its Active Compliance Framework.

This is tip-of-the-iceberg stuff. We're not talking about market consolidation yet. This is strategic technology pairings.

On a separate note, you can now comment directly to this blog, and we look forward to your comments. Flames are welcome, but be forwarned, we can comment back.

And speaking of input, please check out the new poll. We want to understand how you're approaching the archiving of messages. You do remember that you have to do that if your company is subject to Sarbanes-Oxley or SEC mandates, right?