Hot on the heels of the attempts by the Content Group and BSI to create a publically available specification for Enterprise Content Management products, last week saw a very interesting announcement at the Gartner Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit. During one of the keynote presentations, analyst Mark Gilbert informed us of "one of the most interesting things I've seen in my 15 years as an analyst". No, it wasn't Bill Gates being spotted unicyclying down Regent Street in a Google branded baseball cap, it was the news that IBM, EMC, and Microsoft and others are all working together on greater interoperability.

Unlike the news from a month or so back, which involved consultancy The Content Group and other players looking to create best practice in defining and implementing ECM projects, this is a proactive vendor move, with IBM, EMC, Microsoft, OpenText, Oracle, SAP and Alfresco on board. Apparently they've been at it behind the scenes for over a year now and plan to submit their work to standards body Oasis. Maybe it isn't as surprising as it sounds though - as Gilbert said during his presentation, the big vendors have probably listened to their customers' gripes, looked at their sales, and realised that non-interoperable products in this market aren't going to help anyone. In fact siloed environments are only going to add to customer frustration, and if they look to buy best of breed, organisations are going to look to those that can interoperate better.

So what's it all about? Well, according to open source ECM player Alfresco, the so-called Content Management Interoperability Services specification is now at draft implementation phase. The objective is to deliver a common API that can be used to write ECM apps that will work anywhere. The Alfresco release reads: "Just as the database vendors standardised on SQL in the 1980s, today's leading ECM vendors have developed a draft specification with the goal of delivering and enabling interoperability across content repositories."

Bold sentiments indeed, but with the backing of virtually every major ECM vendor, this could mark a real tipping point in the ECM market, and if successful, will make the lives of IT buyers so much easier. In many ways it's a sign off the growing maturity of the market - it's not there yet, but this is certainly one to watch in the coming months.