Last week Autonomy announced plans to acquire Zantaz for $375 million in cash. (Press release)
In acquiring Zantaz, Autonomy adds to its inventory of functionality targeted at e-discovery and e-mail management, most notably archiving and exporting. For Autonomy, this is a move of competitive parity, not advantage. Many competitors such as OpenText, FAST (through partnerships) and EMC Documentum have had such capabilities in their respective e-discovery offerings for a considerable amount of time. It is interesting to note that Industry Analyst, Barry Murphy of Forrester, was quoted as seeing this acquisition as making Autonomy a more attractive acquisition target by platform plays such as IBM, EMC and Oracle. If his insights are correct (seems odd that Autonomy becomes more attractive because of its acquisition of a small e-mail archiving company), the anticipated subsequent acquisition of Autonomy/Zantaz by a platform player would be driven by eliminating competition / increasing market share, as opposed to acquiring additional functionality, which was the PR behind the Zantaz acquisition.
This acquisition also adds to the blurring of "search vendors" (e.g. Autonomy and FAST) and ECM platform vendors (e.g. EMC Documentum, OpenText) regarding who best handles e-discovery. In this regard I concur with the general opinion of Dave Kellogg (not his blatant pitch), President of Mark Logic, whose take on the acquisition is worth a read.
