The marketwide consolidation among content-management vendors continued Monday when Stellent Inc. said it would acquire Optika Inc. in a cash-and-stock deal valued at about $59 million. The combined company will have anticipated annual revenue of about $100 million.

Content-management vendors have been stockpiling complementary technologies and customer bases in a string of deals during the past year. The busiest of those vendors has been Documentum Inc., which bought companies specializing in digital-asset management, records management, and collaboration before agreeing in November to be acquired by storage vendor EMC Corp. for $1.7 billion. IBM made three acquisitions along these lines in 2003, and Interwoven, Open Text, and Vignette all have made multiple acquisitions.

By landing Optika, Stellent--which established itself initially as a supplier of Web content-management software--gets an established suite of business-process-management and records-management tools it can fold into its product line. The company also purchased a small digital-asset-management company called Ancept in August.

The consolidation is a reflection of companies' need to get a handle on their unstructured information--stuff that can't live in traditional table-based business systems. With so many types of unstructured content--ranging from documents and E-mails to photos and presentations--floating about a company, it's often tough for employees to find the information they need to make business decisions. Fewer vendors with broader product suites eventually will lead to companies having more across-the-board access to this kind of information from a single interface.

Dan Ryan, Stellent's executive VP of marketing and business development, says Optika was an attractive target not just because it offered complementary technology, but also because its customer base will help Stellent compete in the revved-up market. "It gives us a broader customer footprint to take advantage of vendor consolidation," Ryan says. "At the conclusion of this transaction, we'll be one of the vendors who have the widest range of products."

The deal is expected to close in April, pending customary shareholder and regulatory approvals. Ryan says Stellent has begun working on integrating the companies' product lines, and that long-term plans call for Stellent to develop a single virtual repository architecture that will essentially let users access content from any legacy repository via a common interface. "It's really about being able to integrate with other repositories and call content from them," he says.

Stellent also issued guidance anticipating that revenue for its third quarter, ended Dec. 31, would be up 20% over the same period a year earlier. The company will report its third-quarter earnings Jan. 20.