Documentum to Acquire, Integrate eRoom

October 15, 2002

Hoping to leapfrog competitors offering collaboration features, Pleasanton, CA-based Documentum (www.documentum.com) has announced its intention to purchase Cambridge, MA-based eRoom for approximately $105 million in cash and stock.

With more than 1,000 major corporate customers, eRoom (www.eroom.com) is a leading independent provider of real-time collaboration technologies including online conferencing and instant messaging. Documentum vice president Whitney Tidmarsh says the acquisition will accelerate Documentum's previously announced Team Manager strategy, integrating eRoom's collaborative environment with Documentum's document services, workflow and repository. "Integration with Documentum will give the eRoom collaboration environment the ability to integrate with third-party apps, using Documentum as a conduit."

Once the merger is completed in December, the company says it will tightly integrate eRoom with Documentum in a multiphase approach. The first phase, expected to be completed in early 2003, will be to make the Documentum repository available to the eRoom team collaboration environment. The second phase will allow meeting results and collaborative content to be stored back to the Documentum repository for archiving and reuse. The company says it will port the Windows-based eRoom technology to Java 2 Enterprise Edition as part of the integration with the just-released Documentum 5 suite.

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