Is it business-intelligence software? A search engine? Wiki software? Whatever it is, EMC is on the acquisition lookout for technologies and vendors that will help businesses and their employees draw better knowledge from the growing volumes of information within their companies.

The $11-billion-a-year company is one of the leaders in information management, yet its focus is primarily on the big systems that store and crunch data behind the scenes. But EMC is increasingly considering information access from a desktop point of view.

In an interview on Thursday, EMC CTO Jeff Nick talked about the company's evolution, moving from storage systems into its broader strategy of information lifecycle management. Following its acquisitions of Documentum and Captiva, EMC became one of the leaders in content management. The controversial $2.1 billion acquisition of RSA Security a year ago, Nick said, was an obvious fit. How can a tech vendor, he noted, claim to provide a holistic information-management platform without an integrated security offering for that information?

The "next generation" of information management, said Nick, and where there's plenty of opportunity, is "turning attention to the delivery of information to clients and to end users wherever they are, so they can do what they want with it." And this goes beyond what's possible with a simple Google query. "This is rich interaction and real-time analytics," Nick said, and includes being able to look for information using semantics, not just word matching.

These are also things EMC doesn't currently offer. Nick said EMC will continue to expand its information management portfolio, both organically and through acquisitions. So what kind of vendors might EMC be looking to acquire? "Read between the lines of what I'm saying," he advised.

Nick also talked up knowledge management, the idea of capturing knowledge within systems, a problem most vendors are trying to help businesses solve with wikis, collaboration tools, e-learning, and expertise-management software.

Expect to see EMC in the Web 2.0 game, too. "Web 2.0 flips the model upside down in terms of how information is delivered," Nick said. "Web 2.0 is very much a semantic dynamic, a client-side focus."

A user-oriented move into information management would make sense. IDC predicts that information management will be a key focus for the big IT vendors this year, including EMC, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP.

"Information is the last of the big dynamic IT 'platforms' up for grabs, and easily the most important," IDC said in a January report. "A battle for leadership in solving enterprises' fragmented information access and management problems will intensify in 2007 with lots of acquisitions."

To dominate the information-management market, vendors will increasingly try to sell a holistic approach. For IBM, it's what it calls its "information on demand" strategy, which extends from the front end with its OmniFind search engine and the partnerships it has with business-intelligence vendors, down into its content management, data integration software, and DB2 database systems.

IDC predicts vendors will be looking to build up their strategies through search engine and business-intelligence acquisitions. Oracle recently announced plans to acquire Hyperion for $3.3 billion, leaving Business Objects, Cognos, and a large number of smaller BI vendors as possible purchases for Oracle's competitors. On the enterprise search side, meanwhile, IT vendors are likely eyeing Autonomy, Endeca, and Fast.