27 August 2004 IBM has announced plans to acquire enterprise content integration (ECI) specialist Venetica.

Venetica’s flagship software, VeniceBridge, enables applications to access content from unstructured data sources such as documents, images, reports and other digital assets. Venetica’s ECI technology has become a hot property following the Sarbanes-Oxley inspired boom in enterprise content management.

The eighteenth acquisition by IBM in the past three years, it reflects IBM’s decision to target the enterprise content management (ECM) market. It follows relatively recent acquisitions of a variety of other companies in this sector, including Tarian for records management (November 2002); Aptrix for web content management (July 2003); and Green Pastures for collaborative authoring and version control (December 2003).

Venetica will become part of IBM’s highly profitable DB2 data management software arm. The software is able to integrate with both IBM and non-IBM ECM systems, including Documentum, FileNet, Hummingbird, Interwoven, Open Text and Stellent.

“AS a result of the acquisition, companies will be able to gain insight into the information they have that would help them improve customer service, operational efficiencies and productivity,” said Janet Perna, general manager of IBM data management software.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of this year. According to analysts, companies like Venetica typically sell for between $10 million and $50 million.

All 70 of Venetica’s employees will join IBM’s payroll.