The information management software sector continued to shift this month with web content giant Vignette agreeing to acquire Tower Technology in a development that will take it deep into traditional enterprise document and records management software.

Vignette will not lack for competition. Last year there were a series of combinations that redefined the content management landscape, seeing it blur into the related fields of storage, regulatory compliance, collaboration and portals.

Many of the mergers and acquisitions are being driven by the need to comply with regulations such as data protection rules, Basel 2, industry codes of conduct and the US Sarbanes-Oxley Act, intended to improve corporate governance. But the need to find a fit between managing data held in web sites, emails, paper and electronic documents would be pressing even without such rules. The question for vendors and users will be how to make sense of this sea of information and bring together silos of data held in various containers.

When the deal completes by the end of March, Tower will add document capture capabilities to the skills Vignette has picked up through two other recent acquisitions - collaboration tools supplier Intraspect and portals maker Epicentric.

"When you look at the way a web site is developed, document capture is one of the largest aspects you need, and Tower brings that," said Swamy Viswanathan, Vignette vice president of content and integration. "There's data that needs to be surfaced on the web, and there's the information delivery that you'd typically associate with portals. All of this needs to come together."

Unusually, the acquisition may initially have most impact here in the UK. Although an Australian firm, Tower makes about half of its revenue in Europe and most of its customers are UK blue-chips.

The products of both Vignette and Tower are based on Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE), but content management experts said the deal also makes sense in other ways. "This marks the continuation of the rapid consolidation of the enterprise content management market and lifts Vignette back into a contender position in the market," wrote analyst firm Ovum. "This acquisition rounds out Vignette's product offering, in terms of technology at least. [The deal provides Vignette] with the pieces to compete alongside Filenet, OpenText and Documentum. It will also significantly strengthen Vignette's position against mid-tier players such as Stellent and Interwoven."

Of course, many of Vignette's rivals mentioned by Ovum have themselves been busy. In January, Stellent agreed to purchase Optika, boosting its document imaging and processing capabilities. Last year, document management giant Documentum acquired collaborative tools maker eRoom and then was itself swallowed up by data storage giant EMC.

Interwoven, which like Vignette has its roots in web content management, last year bought yet another collaborative software maker, iManage. Also last year, Open Text acquired fellow enterprise content management company Ixos.

For today's Vignette and Tower users, the combination offers an opportunity to merge the old world of enterprise content management and the new world of web and portal content management.

"Customers have implemented different departmental solutions," said David Thorpe, Vignette European business strategy director. "The challenge now is to deliver new applications that deliver content across the data silos. We can help customers with [regulation] compliance issues but compliance is a catalyst - the real business value is in making the business efficient."

Eddie Short, director of consultancy Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, said the combination promises to help buyers move towards a united management solution. "We see the move to a single content management solution as the goal," Short said. "The aim is a single repository of content. Underneath you want a modern architecture that is pure XML, and this a way to get there."