I suppose that if you asked anybody following the space to provide one word to describe enterprise content management in recent times, ‘consolidation’ and ‘rationalisation’ wouldn’t be to far off the top suggestions, closely followed by our old friends across the software business, ‘mergers’ and ‘acquisitions’.

The conventional wisdom is that these deals have the effect of deadening the market and creating a situation where the rich keep on getting richer and the poor get poorer. Unable to compete against huge budgets, startups cannot win share and wither on the proverbial -- or so the theory goes. It’s certainly true that with the current near-frozen IPO market, it’s very tough for smaller players to go head to head with the established players.

The old advice of ‘get big, get niche or get out’ still has relevance and, of course, several former ECM giants such as FileNet, Documentum and Stellent have combined the first and last of these, opting to get big and get out of the market as independents to become scions of the industry giants.

Others are defending niches but some, praise the Lord, have far bigger aspirations. The old advice was written before open-source software development was considered as a serious platform for a business model and it’s only open-source that can prevent the ECM sector becoming a plaything of acquisition-crazed behemoths.

Perhaps the most interesting of these new competitors is a company I met up with for the first time recently, Alfresco. A true open-source company that uses the GPL licence, Alfresco has plenty of credentials to suggest it could stick around to make things interesting.

Its management and development team is a dream ticket. The CEO is John Powell, who formerly worked at proprietary software firms including Oracle, and Business Objects, where he rose to become COO. The CTO is John Newton, who co-founded Documentum. The engineering team is based on former coders from Documentum and Interwoven, providing a balance of documentum management and web content management skills. And Alfresco even has a mix of geographical know-how as Powell is a Brit and Newton, an American, has spent plenty of time over on this side of the pond.

Powell’s contention is an interesting one. He suggests that while combinations such as EMC-Documentum have created wealth and marketing power, the stream of deal-making to add in other capabilities has resulted in more time being spent on integration than core R&D. By starting with a blank screen, corralling the goodwill of veteran developers and taking advantage of the latest tools, he suggests that Alfresco can challenge the big guys by the old trick of building a better mousetrap.

There are plenty of people in thrall to the behemoths and citing risk aversion as an excuse for pricey, underperforming projects, but Linux arrived in enterprises through the back door, filling niches as it went along, despite those firms being nominally Windows shops. As new projects kick off, there’s no reason why Alfresco can’t plough a similar furrow and become a significant challenge to the status quo.