This article was an April Fool's Joke Released on April 1, 2010.
It is not serious or true and was written for your enjoyment:

Breaking News - 2010-04-01

Boston, MA: Technology giant Hewlett Packard Company (Revenue $160B) today announced the acquisition of Open Text, EMC and several yet to be named smaller enterprise content management software vendors. According to John Gutfreund spokesman for Solomon Smith Barney, who in a released statement claimed that the deals were valued at $40 billion dollars.  He went on to point out that there was an additional reserve involving a combination of cash and stock for carrying out further acquisitions which will be announced as appropriate.  The statement, which was rather tersely phrased, did not clarify the motives for such a sudden move.

The speed of the acquisition comes as a surprise to many insiders in the ECM industry (Kollabria analysts included) and was only partially explained by HP's Mark Hurd restating an earlier quote which appeared in the Dallas Post Tribune “After a thorough review of our business, we have formulated a plan that will enable HP to begin delivering its full potential. We can perform better, for our customers and partners, our employees and our shareholders, and we will..... Today we are carrying out phase I of that plan."

Industry reaction has been brisk this morning as a series of hastily written emails began to flood our inbox from industry insiders, leaders, pundits and luminaries. We'll share with you some of the reaction statements we have received or read so far.

Reaction Statements

Attorney General Eric Holder when asked about the anti-trust implications of such a industry take over said " The tea party has a better chance of reversing healthcare reform than we do of stopping HP.  They are hell bent to do this. Lord knows why.  They claim they only make .42 cents per PC in profit, so the 5% gross profit margin of ECM vendors looks pretty good"

Open Text CEO John Shackleton simply said " After buying 32 companies over the last 20 years we were getting tired of doing that anyway."

AIIM President John Mancini via telephone said " As President of AIIM I have been trying to streamline our board for years. This makes the whole process of board meetings a lot simpler, we can conduct all our meetings in a single phone call. When they asked me about potential acquisition candidates,  I joked and told them to just go around the market share wheel and buy everybody I'm done with this anyway. Who knew that this is exactly what they would do? "  In an attempt to cast a positive light on the gigantic merger which will no doubt put AIIM out of business, he went on to say "The move by HP greatly reduces the amount of work we have to do in our annual State of the Industry survey.  As many had suspected, we have been reporting the same market charts for years, just moving a few numbers around to make it look like something was actually happening.  I mean people, come on... you can only repeat yourself for so long. This lets us do a market share pie chart that no one can argue with, and maybe now we can find something new to talk about."

Nien Ling Wacker, President of Laserfiche, which according to other reports was the only company in the AIIM market share pie chart that was not acquired said "Laserfiche is worth more than they were offering, so I turned them down.  Somebody else will come along".  Unfazed by the daunting competition Laserfiche now faces, a defiant Ms. Wacker went on to say "I've been doing this for so long, i'm not afraid of anybody, HP shmaipee, maybe Microsoft will buy us."

Former ECM scanner industry mastermind, and ex-Kodak VP Don McMahan said "What do you think I've been working on since leaving Kodak? There's more to life than coming up with AFS to sell for the rest of my life. A lot of people are going to be shocked when they find out they'll be working for me starting tomorrow" (We'll let you figure out what an AFS is)

Russell Hunt, Regional Manager for Kodak apparently emailed out a statement which simply said "Lets be professional about it. No comment"

Reynolds Bish, President and CEO of Kofax said "I've made millions, my goal was to make billions, and now I've done that.  Fox Radio, here I come."

Dave Marcus, VP Business Development for K2 Software had a very straight forward reaction with typical South African bluster said "This takes a lot of the riff raff out of the market place, and leaves just us and the big boys.  I mean, if I gave HP a 20 year head start they still would not come up with the innovation we can muster in 20 minutes."

A telgram "Postmarked" from Marex Island in the South Pacific simply said "This pretty much wipes out the ECM software community in Lincoln, NE. We will however be back for Nebraska football."

When calling the FileBound office in Lincoln, we could very clearly hear Sr. VP John Eilers answering the phone "Good morning HP Software, how can I help you".

Steve Jobs, President and CEO of Apple said " What's ECM anyway?"

While you're here, why don't you take a look around the new techinfocenter......and listen to the Doobies...