Big Blue sets its sights on market dominance

IBM is not a company that rolls over and loses battles. It wants to be first in every market, and the fields of enterprise content management (ECM), enterprise search and email management systems are no exceptions. Despite being a large player, IBM is quite late to the ECM field and has had to grow fast to compensate. Through a series of strategic acquisitions and a great deal of background integration, IBM has pieced together a new product family, officially announced in March. Lastly, there is the new scope of ECM in search and email management. The ease of use and usefulness of Google when it comes to searching across languages, file types, data sources, and to accept natural language queries, has raised the bar with the ECM vendors. Last year, IBM announced that it would have an enterprise search capability and codenamed it Masala, but not much has been heard about it since.