With the drumbeat of consolidation growing ever louder since we first put this list together in 2000, you'd think identifying a hundred companies that matter in knowledge management would be increasingly easier to assemble, right? Heck, it simply follows that with fewer companies to choose from, it would be simpler to pick 100, right? Not at all.

As you'll see in our Spring Buyers' Guide, our knowledge management community consists of more than 1,500 companies, whose offerings range from forms processing to social networking, content management to collaboration, imaging to, well, you name it. And, no, we¹re not trying to be everything for everybody, but we are firmly committed to knowledge management as an attitude, not an application.

So, those of us who put the list together—KM practitioners, theorists, vendors, their customers, analysts and editors—had a hell of a time agreeing on the companies we selected. Just as we did last year, we "cheated" a little by adding a separate category—consultants and analysts (and, this year, integrators).