ePlus announced that it is purchasing the software assets of Digital Paper in an effort to streamline cross-company communications for users of its enterprise cost management solutions.

Digital Paper’s content management system will be used to help ePlus customers share large, complex, unstructured documents, such as engineering drawings, facilities diagrams, blueprints and technical manuals, with other departments or trading partners. The technology gives customers the ability to retrieve and annotate mission-critical documents over the Web, streamlining business operations and enabling collaboration across product and asset lifecycles, ePlus said.

ePlus’s main product line, ePlus Enterprise Cost Management (eECM), is software that helps businesses reduce the costs of purchasing, owning, and financing goods and services. The software combines business process outsourcing, e-procurement, asset management, product and catalog content management, supplier enablement, strategic sourcing and financial services. The Digital Paper acquisition adds content management and document exchange capabilities to that mix.

Analysts applauded the move. "Insufficient access to and exchange of information is the bane of many supply management strategies," said Tim Minahan, vice president of supply chain research for The Aberdeen Group, a Boston consultancy. "Digital Paper has been battle tested as a platform for fostering document exchange and collaboration in enterprise-class environments. The solution will effectively extend ePlus' collaborative cost management solutions."

In the transaction, ePlus acquired all of Digital Paper’s intellectual property, including its DigitalPaper XE, ViewMark, DocPak, docQuest, DirectSight, DigitalPaper Wireless and Idocs software. It also received rights to several Digital Paper patents and trademarks, including the Digital Paper name. Several of Digital Paper’s customers and key personnel were also transferred to ePaper in the deal.

“Content management has always been an area of focus because it is so vital to initiatives like strategic sourcing and electronic procurement,” said Ken Farber, president of ePlus. “Through this acquisition, we are now able to broaden our leading content management solutions to include technical content access and collaboration.”