EMC Plans To Acquire Document Sciences

EMC Corporation (Hopkinton, Mass.) and Document Sciences Corporation (Carlsbad, Calif.), a document output management (DOM) software provider, have signed a definitive agreement under which EMC will acquire Document Sciences, according to a press release. The roughly $85 million deal was announced in late December.

EMC intends to operate Document Sciences as a business unit within its content management and archiving division. That division's president, Mark Lewis, said that the acquisition would allow EMC to deliver a complete transactional content management solution with high-volume, content-rich task processing, sophisticated capture, business process management, records management and archiving, and automated document output management capabilities.

Celent senior analyst Jeff Goldberg expects more document automation vendors to be acquired by larger platform and process players in the next few years. "The document automation space has matured from basic document production to an integral part of a content and workflow strategy," Goldberg says. "Also, as the space has grown, technologies have modernized and the functionally set has converged across the marketplace, meaning most solutions fit well into a services oriented architecture, if not providing the framework moving forward."

The acquisition is subject to closing conditions, such as Document Sciences' stockholder and regulatory approval.