As I talk to people in the content-technology industry (if I may call it that), I'm struck by a common thread that has begun to emerge in conversations involving roadmaps and futures. Vendors are beginning to unshackle themselves from acronyms. Let me spare you the suspense and take you straight to the disturbing punchline: I believe we are headed for an acronym crisis.

I've heard Digital Asset Management vendors say that DAM is not a good acronym any more, because it conjures a narrow, obsolete picture of the problem space. DAM platforms have grown. Offerings like MediaBeacon R3volution, MediaBin (now owned by Autonomy), North Plains Telescope, and others, are beginning to include functionalities that are, in many cases, rather ECM-like. Likewise, many WCM products -- Alterian Immediacy, PaperThin CommonSpot, and many others -- continue to incorporate more and more DAM-like features (e.g., lightbox previews, inline image editing, renditions, image metadata support, Flash previews). Some products, like Day Software's Communiqué, have such smooth integration between WCM and DAM offerings that it's hard to tell where one begins and the other one ends.

But it's not just a matter of WCM+DAM convergence (something that's been talked about, and has been happening, for a long time now). Search and Web Analytics are increasingly integral to Content Management solutions, and these technologies are, in turn, driving more personalization and dynamism into Web-facing systems. The information that comes out of all this has high business value and needs to be fed back into any number of other business applications (CRM, BI, KM, Sales Lead Management systems, etc.), lest ROI suffer. But the crisscrossing of so many technologies leads to a paradox: What do you call a system that combines features of WCM, DAM, Web Analytics, Search and Information Access, and maybe CRM as well? No one acronym seems to do the job.

All of this begs the question of whether acronyms are really that important to begin with. I think they are, actually. (Otherwise we wouldn't have so many of them -- and they wouldn't persist for so long after becoming obsolete.) As old acronyms fall into disuse, new ones emerge. CMS gives way to WCM which gives way to WEM (Web Experience Management), which in turn will someday give way to something else. Right now, though, the industry is at a crossroads. What do you call a CMS that incorporates aspects of DAM, WCM, DM, Search, Web Analytics, and Text Mining, plus (say) a few social apps? You can call it a content platform (CP), but that feels vaguely unsatisfying.

Nomenclature is important, I think. But in this case, I'm fresh out of acronyms. And for an analyst, that's embarrassing.