IBM To Buy Green Pasture

Maybe now IBM has a complete content-management suite.

The vendor, which has been pushing what it called an end-to-end enterprise content-management product line, made its third software acquisition in that arena in just over a year on Wednesday, scooping up privately held Green Pasture Software Inc. to further bolster its content-management product line. Financial details weren't disclosed.

Green Pasture Software's core product, called G5, tracks the information sources used to assemble compound documents consisting of multiple content elements, such as text, images, computer-aided design drawings, spreadsheets and financial tables, and multimedia files. The software immediately will become part of IBM's content-management product line, a segment of its DB2 Information Management suite. IBM similarly adopted technologies obtained from its November 2002 acquisition of records-management vendor Tarian Software Inc. and its July purchase of Web content-management vendor Aptrix.

While the Green Pasture acquisition is likely a modest one in terms of dollar value, Delphi Group analyst Hadley Reynolds says the string of acquisitions sends a clear signal to other vendors about IBM's strategy in the enterprise content-management market. "If anybody thought that IBM wasn't serious about coming after FileNet and Documentum, this cements that story," says Reynolds. "They've bought their way into a pretty competitive position." Reynolds says that prior to the acquisitions, IBM's content-management product line was weak because of a lack of functional applications to complement its content infrastructure products, most notably its DB2 Content Manager repository.

Meta Group projects enterprise content-management to be a $9 billion market by 2007, and analysts expect IBM and other infrastructure vendors to move aggressively to capture as much of that market as possible.