For the last years, consolidation has been very strong into the ECM/WCM/Portal industry. You cannot find any longer so many public companies but I have listed them and will do my best to update the calendar of results on a quarterly basis.

Most of the time, the software is a part of the business, or the “content management software” is a part of the business. This definition is a little bit fuzzy – I agree- but that’s where this market is too. So I will mainly focus at this part as I am covering the “content management” business only.

(CET Time)

2Q09 results publications are on going, you don’t need to be an analyst to see there are mixed results… Tough years are not so tough for some, but conversely you can’t judge on one or two missed quarters – or brilliant quarters. I would not bet so much on the likely-to-be-winners of this downturn, yet.

I am certainly not an analyst and won’t pretend at all defining a global trend into the market, but I like to make some free comments about these results:

Autonomy – Interwoven (LSE: AU): published impressive financial results (Fully diluted EPS grew by 61%, I am impressed…), once again. No doubts about their ability to grow organically. Their 50% of recurrent business looks quite low for such a big company (for this market)... I am positively impressed by their ability to convince new clients. That said, their acquisitions skills have been more questioned in the past, and I am not sure they are improving so much reading their PR and their slides: “Interwoven integration essentially complete with group gross margins rebounding to pre-acquisition levels” : I am translating freely this quote in “OK Interwoven margins went down during several months, so what?”. Due to costs of restructuring or something else? We don’t know, but as they don’t explicitly give this reason, I will look at the evolution of this integration closely. We don’t get either any numbers about this acquisition so we can’t say if it is or not a good deal – done for more than 700 M$. When you don’t show up numbers, you are rarely proud of them. And when the MD speaks about the future, the trend is explicit, there is no trend: Dr. Lynch concluded, "Despite the continued uncertainty in the markets, we remain cautiously optimistic.”. Whatever the results of the next quarter will be, he will be right. Nice shot Dr Lynch.

Open Text (NASDAQ: OTEX): The other cash-machine of this industry has recently acquired Vignette. Whereas I do understand the value of the Autonomy acquisition of Interwoven (even if the execution seems not to be “smooth” but that not a surprise either), I have been quite sceptical about the integration of Vignette into Open text (read my blog’s post). Open text will detail its integration plan of Vignette during its next results’ conference call (August, the 20^th). I want to read numbers, not a general and useless bullshit such as “cross selling synergies”! I want to see how they will propose to their clients, investors and employees a good story. I will also closely read anything about how they see the future’s trend.

Red Hat (NYSE: RHT): the open source champion – extremely profitable too - is aiming at the application business but does not provide yet any significant financial information about this (likely to be small) part of their business (Jboss portal), so I just don’t cover it so far. But it may change considering their growing interest into this content management software business…

Day (SIX: DAYN): the Swiss WCM vendor (last one to be publicly listed and focus only at WCM…) will release its results in August, the 7^th. Unfortunately we don’t have the chance to have any other information about the 1Q09 but their revenues (7.4 MCHF versus… the same 7.4 MCHF in 2008) and this laconic quote: “Day Software […] today reconfirmed guidance for financial results for 1H 2009 based on strong customer growth in Q1 2009 from continued momentum for its ground-breaking CQ5 platform”. So I will just have a close look at their costs evolution since 2008 and the new projects revenues.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) is reporting global results for their software operations, so I am more focusing at the global trend. The company is heavily followed and I don’t have anything brilliant to add. Same for Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL). Their revenues are clearly going down (IBM 1Q09 and Oracle 1Q09) but I just believe – too bad for the open source gurus – it is from far too soon to believe in the imminent extinction of the dinosaurs and I am not even yet convinced of their real decline.

Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT): everybody will look at Sharepoint 2010 results… in 2010. Period.

SAP (NYSE: SAP): the German giant has been seriously hit by the economic downturn. Will it recover quickly? To be followed in July the 29^th. To be also followed: their implication into Portal (SAP Portal) and also of course ECM through SAP Venture (Alfresco, Newgen, …) or thanks to their long relationship with Open Text of course. Consolidation seems to be trendy in 2009 again; but will SAP take the move in the middle of the storm? Seems to be unlikely isn’t it? OK so I have just written it may come as M&A are by definition surprising.

EMC (NYSE: EMC): 2Q09 results to be published later today… I will comment them if… I find something interesting to say!

SDL (LSE: SDL): the mother company of Tridion should release in August their mid term 2009 results. To be followed up…

Alterian (LSE: ALN) cannot care less of their investors, and the acquisition of the CMS Mediasurface cannot be commented therefore. Their last release is just something they did because they had too and basically they gave more or less no relevant information. At least they have the honesty to admit it (“Alterian […] today publishes its Interim Management Statement covering the period from 1 April 2009  to the date of this announcement, as required by the Listing Authority disclosure rules.”) but some care for their investors would not be inappropriate.

 Please let me know which (publicly listed) guy I forgot …

Disclosure: No position but I am working for a privately hold WCM, open source, software vendor (Jahia), who competes with the software sold by the here above vendors.