Stellent swoops on content security specialists

By Jessica Twentyman

Enterprise content management (ECM) software vendor Stellent has announced the acquisition of two companies specialising in content security, SealedMedia and Bitform.

SealedMedia, a London-based digital rights management (DRM) company sold for $10m in cash. Approximately 30 SealedMedia employees will join Stellent, including Dr Martin Lambert, the company’s founder and chief technology officer.

“The cost of entry to DRM is extremely high – it would probably cost around $100m to develop an enterprise-class solution – so this was a very good deal for us,” said David Macey, Stellent’s vice president of international operations. “We looked at Authentica [which has since been bought by EMC], but decided that SealedMedia was years ahead of it in terms of features and function.”

The DRM market has been slow to mature, but is now gaining ground. The SealedMedia acquisition will enable Stellent customers to manage and control the distribution of valuable intellectual assets, particularly where there is exchange of content with customers and business partners beyond the firewall.

Bitform, meanwhile, is a Chicago, Illinois-based specialist in content filtering technologies. The $1.2m cash purchase gives Stellent content cleansing and filtering technology for finding and removing hidden and sensitive metadata in files. This will be increasingly important as Stellent looks to build on its foothold in compliance and e-discovery projects, said Macey.

By embedding content security as part of its wider ECM offerings, Stellent will be able to differentiate itself from other pure-play ECM vendors, said Gartner analyst Kenneth Chin. However, he added, it will need to act fast: “Microsoft’s future release of Windows Vista will include new DRM features and, along with Adobe, is expected to provide these capabilities from a broader, infrastructure perspective.”