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Initial thoughts from ebizQ columnist and OnStrategies' President Tony Baer:

Extended Tony Baer commentary here.

IBM's acquisition of FileNet had an almost anticlimactic air about it. In retrospect, the more obvious question is what took IBM so long? Heck, it’s been almost three years since EMC bought Documentum.

IBM has recently been on a binge in acquiring some of its closest partners, witness last week’s MRO acquisition. FileNet is no different. While company officials couldn’t answer off the bat how many joint engagements they have, they are clearly no strangers to each other. And even where formal joint engagements leave off, clearly FileNet has enough IBM Global 2000 customers that there is large potential for the deepening its footprint.

Regarding the urgency, there's little secret that it’s all about compliance. Despite all the grumbling, SOX is not likely to go away anytime soon. And thanks to recent publicized security breaches from VA, AOL and elsewhere, neither are privacy protection laws. Companies under stronger mandates than ever to protect the veracity and confidentiality of their data, and they are going to require more robust management tools in place to track who retrieved what and when. For IBM and others, there's clearly lots of money to be made helping customers pick up the trail of breadcrumbs.

From a technology standpoint, the acquisition of FileNet is a logical follow-on to its two-year old Venetica buy, which literally put the pieces in place enabling IBM's Information Integration tools to access the trove of unstructured data sources, such as FileNet.

And with FileNet, IBM is acquiring a fairly healthy company with sufficient market presence and name recognition to retain its own brand name once inside IBM's Data Management business fold. And with IBM, FileNet gains a huge service channel to upgrade more of the installed base to the more dynamic, workflow-enabled P8 product architecture that gets beyond the domains of traditional image management. That's a work that's still in progress.

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