The rise of enterprise content management over the last five years has seen the entry of giants into a segment once characterised by names only a specialist would have recognised.

Microsoft has made its play with an in-house approach that has delivered the hugely successful SharePoint. IBM has also done a lot of work behind the scenes with content management services, but admitted the need for more when it announced the acquisition of FileNet in 2006. Similarly, Oracle got a fair way down the line, tying in services with its database, but then acquired Stellent last year for its customers and deeper domain knowledge.

These were decent strategies that were characteristic of the seasoned companies that delivered them but perhaps the least convincing strategy came from EMC. The company had made its name as the Switzerland of storage, being an independent company that was not tied to servers in the way rivals IBM, HP and Sun were. EMC was pretty much a pure hardware company until it acquired Documentum in 2003, although it had signalled its intent by agreeing to buy storage software giant Legato Systems just months earlier.

EMC justified itself by saying storage needed intelligent software if companies were to automate the protection of files. Then, in a move that again puzzled many onlookers, EMC acquired VMware and said storage and server virtualisation needed to converge. Plenty of people scratched chins and wondered if EMC was imagining synergies that were invisible to the rest of us.

Today, with unstructured data continuing to grow at a bewildering speed, with compliance mandates showing no sign of letting up, with ECM and storage infrastructure walking in lockstep, and with VMware shaping up as the biggest hypergrowth company in technology since Google, nobody is criticising EMC’s strategy. Proof, if ever it were needed, that lateral thinking can work wonders.