Several major vendors in the enterprise content management (ECM) space are working together to produce a new industry standard that could dramatically improve the interoperability of proprietary ECM products.

Speaking at the annual Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit held by analyst firm Gartner, analyst Mark Gilbert told delegates that Microsoft, IBM and EMC have been working on the new standard for the past year with open standards body Oasis.

The content management interoperability standard is being put together partly because the big vendors are finding enterprise customers eschewing their on-premise products precisely because they are creating unmanageable, siloed environments.

"This is one of the most interesting things I've seen in my 15 years as an analyst," Gilbert said.

"It won't be perfect … but it's interesting to see three major rivals working together to allow APIs and programmatic interfaces between their systems."

Gilbert added that organisations are increasingly moving to cloud-based portal, collaboration and content management solutions to solve traditional headaches around integration and high total cost of ownership.

"There is a lot more choice now. We believe that, in four years' time, half of you will have moved at least one critical component into the cloud," he said.