Over the years, the content management market has seen a great deal of consolidation through acquisition, creating vendors with more extensive product ranges that they tout as enterprise almost by default. If you have web, document, digital asset and records management then you must be enterprise.

There are a number of problems with this consolidation that are well-documented, notably the maturity of product integration; just because you buy Oracle UCM (Stellent) doesn’t mean it works out of the box with Oracle WebCenter. But there’s another issue too: not all the clients are enterprise. Once you’ve sold your massive projects into big corporate clients, how do you tap into the long tail?

Increasingly we’re seeing the larger vendors buy up smaller companies not just to become more enterprise, but to reach a broader market that can’t afford enterprise licence fees. We see this in SDL’s acquisition of Tridion, very much a mid-tier WCM. It’s also been in evidence with the RedDot / Open Text product offering, with the RedDot WCM being able to offer trendier features aimed a less “enterprise” installations, such as User Generated Content plug-ins.

Perhaps the most obvious example of this non-enterprise approach is Mediasurface. Even though Mediasurface is a WCM rather than ECM offering, it has many clients who would struggle to pay for the core product licence, Morello client, database licence, and Solaris servers. Yet it has many small clients who it does well from, particularly in UK local government. To increase its stake in this market, Mediasurface has acquired both Immediacy and the SilverBullet hosted CMS offering, rebranded as Pepperio. This enables the company to dip more easily into the long tail.

So why is this important for you, the customer?

On the positive side, it means that if you’re a small customer you can still get a product from an established vendor rather than a high-risk niche supplier. If you’re a large customer, it enables the vendor to leverage the features of the products in its portfolio to provide you with a more comprehensive system, potentially in a more agile way.

On the negative side, if you do go for a small product from one of these companies, you have to ensure that you don’t turn yourself into a small fish in a big pond. If you go for a small WCM package and you need something quick, you’re more likely to get it when you represent 10% of the supplier’s revenue than if you represent less than 1%. And if you are the big fish, don’t expect the small pond to be anything other than a set of nearly joined up puddles.