To be sure competition among vendors is good for customers of enterprise content management software, driving innovation and a strong commitment to meeting customer needs. But there also comes a time when competitors need to drop the gloves and work together to create standards that allow various software applications to work together with less effort.

As announced last month, seven leading ECM and enterprise software companies, including Open Text, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP, have joined up to collaborate on the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard. This proposed open standard is intended to offer new ways for content applications to "talk" to content repositories and has been submitted for acceptance as an OASIS standard.

While the history of cross-vendor collaboration isn't without its share of false-starts, I have a feeling that this time around is different. One piece of evidence is that it is already well down the road toward becoming real. For example, our development team at Open Text in conjunction with our partners at SAP AG have already created a working prototype that uses the CMIS standard to manage content from SAP applications with Open Text Enterprise Library Services.

In a podcast interview I recently completed, I made the point that this functional prototype demonstrates practically the theory behind this interface. This more than just "slideware" and I'm confident that this is going to move into product in the near future. A standard such as CMIS represents the maturing of the ECM market.
One of the main reasons I'm bullish about CMIS is that it offers customers a host of benefits including an improved end user experience, more robust and flexible business process automation, and a breaking down of silos of content, ultimately leading to what I see as a new generation of content applications.

Does the new standard mean long-time competitors become long-term friends? More likely, the race is on to see who can build the most interesting and useful content-enabled applications embracing CMIS. It this race, however, it is likely customers will come out on top.