Autonomy’s recent agreement to buy Zantaz will look a smarter and smarter move with every crashing wave of corporate governance rules and regulations, and these waves have no end in site.

While a lot of merger and acquisition activity is in pursuit of scale or take out a noisome competitor, Autonomy-Zantaz is interesting because it points to a more strategic, customer-focused direction. By joining together what is still essentially an enterprise search company with a firm that specialises in the discovery process for legal or governance activity, Autonomy is connecting two closely related processes and extending its own role in finding and using information hidden deep in organisation’s virtual vaults.

Spotting the invisible nexus between companies competing in what appear to be different software categories needs a rare eye. EMC is arguably the company with the best sight here, spotting the value of a document management software company, Documentum, and a virtualisation software company, VMware, to bolster what was a storage hardware pure-play.

ECM is itself a category created by the conflation of document management, imaging, workflow, web content management and other elements. Consolidation in the sector isn’t over yet and while most recent deals have been about acquiring customers and patching ill-executed former strategies –- hello Oracle! –- others may take a more ambitious direction. Mike Davis at Ovum has in the past suggested that business intelligence firms could be interested in adding ECM capabilities, for example, although this was a possibility dismissed by Alan Pelz-Sharpe.

Perhaps someone out there will see value in ECM tools in providing a mass template for some form of business process outsourcing, for example in governance for vertical markets.