Hyland announced on March 4 that it intends to acquire content platform provider Nuxeo. The deal is expected to close in April or May. Coming on the heels of its acquisition of Alfresco, which we blogged about here, just months ago, Hyland will soon be the home for the two most widely deployed open source enterprise content management (ECM)/content platforms. This acquisition reveals Hyland’s point of view into the future of content management as it continues an active acquisition strategy to move into adjacent spaces and accelerate its cloud offerings.

Nuxeo and Alfresco have been two of the main beneficiaries of an overall modernization trend in content management. Large, regulated industries such as banking and insurance are ready to migrate their aging, on-premises content management deployments to newer, more flexible content platforms, and this modernization trend still has untapped potential. Nuxeo has been actively investing in its ability to scale and evangelizing its ability to deliver high-performance, multi-billion-document repositories, particularly in Amazon Web Services.

What Nuxeo can bring to the Hyland ecosystem is its track record of platform innovation, of pushing the envelope (and sometimes competitors’ buttons), and of being appreciated by the engineers and architects who wanted to build cool apps for their clients and users. Nuxeo’s commitment to open source — not only for its own core platform but as contributors to the projects they used under the covers — is unparalleled in the current vendor landscape. Hyland should encourage this spirit to flourish and not squash it as it becomes a content management mega-vendor.

Hyland will soon find itself with a well-stocked buffet of content platforms and packaged solutions, allowing it to serve a very broad set of use cases and customer requirements. Its challenge into the remainder of 2021 will be to craft the right menu for its sales teams, partners, and customers and understand the strengths and weaknesses of each app and platform — not an enviable task. Anyone got a fork?