ECM Industry

Since my old company, Document Sciences, was bought by EMC, I have been following the Enterprise Content Management market closely; The Fortune 500 have invested billions of dollars in databases and ERP technologies leading to multi-billion dollar franchises such as Oracle, SAP, etc. focused on the structured data world. However, the next frontier of productivity will come from the unstructured data that includes your emails, you-tube videos, word document, power point presentations, pictures, etc.

Earlier this year AIIM released its annual State of the ECM Industry 2009 report which found that overall, electronic content at an organizational level is in a mess.Revisiting the report in the cold light of day AIIM President John Mancini summed up the findings of the report on the Digital Landfill blog recently.Hardly a day goes by that we don't find ourselves covering some of the eight facts about document management that he raises. Three of these in particular, strike a chord with us, as we are sure they do with you.Email ExposureLegal DiscoverySharePoint Deployments

To know what's really going on within a firm or the industry in which it operates you need to watch where the money is flowing. In September money flowed in some interesting directions within the ECM sector. At Open Text it flowed out, as Chairman and CEO John Shakelton dumped almost all of his shareholdings. In contrast at NewGen in India it flowed in through a confirmed investment from SAP's venture arm (who already invest in open source ECM player Alfresco, among others).

SharePoint suffers, as mid-market Enterprise CMS (ECM) vendors excel, a report from CMS Watch reveals. After an evaluation of 30 leaders in the ECM industry, everyone seems to be happy except the Microsoft people — which seems to be becoming a trend. Ironically enough, it is Microsoft SharePoint that is propelling the industry forward.

Just yesterday, some major enterprise content management industry heavy weights — Microsoft, IBM, EMC, Alfresco, Open Text, Oracle and SAP, announced the first ever Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification draft enabling interoperability across content repositories. By creating a common API, companies can develop write-once, run-anywhere, content and social applications.

Is SAP slowly moving into the ECM space? It's a question that has been asked so many times over the years that it has become something of a "chestnut," as we say in England. For if you are ever at a loss as to what to chat about with people in the ECM industry, SAP is a surefire conversation starter. SAP was (allegedly) going to buy Open Text on many occasions, but as of today still have not. They were (allegedly) shocked when Open Text bought iXos ( a firm that focused almost exclusively on providing content and archiving software for SAP), but did nothing about it. They were (allegedly) going to buy German vendor Saperion, but didn't. Once Oracle moved in to the ECM space with their acquisition of Stellent, fine ECM minds asserted that SAP would be forced to respond, but they didn't.

Over the course of 2003, AIIM surveyed over 1,800 end-users of content and document management technologies in six countries — United States, Canada, Brazil, United Kingdom (Great Britain and Northern Ireland), Ireland, and Germany. The survey results point to six major findings relative to user concerns and challenges about Enterprise Content Management (ECM) technologies.

The healthcare industry is a vertical market that cannot be overlooked when ECM VARs are looking to grow document management sales. HIPAA, EHRs, and the need for improved security of patient information are three major factors driving therapid growth of document management and transactional content management technology in the healthcare industry. What should VARs be focusing on in order to leverage document management sales opportunities in healthcare? Business Solutions asked four industry experts. Used with permission from Business Solutions magazine

"ECM [enterprise content management] continues to be the hottest sector of the software industry," says HK Bain, CEO of Digitech. The challenge (and the opportunity) lies in determining how to best manage all that content and what outside factors influence how that content is handled. Used with permission from Business Solutions magazine

The working group on "Interoperable ECM" (iECM) sponsored by industry association AIIM held another formative meeting today. It's tough getting standards groups off the ground, but the group saw good progress, not the least of which was to decide to eschew developing new standards before existing ones could be mapped concretely against canonical content management processes to see what exactly is missing. For a while, the discussion drifted a bit too deeply into the the semantic-web weeds, but I think practical goals will prevail, so if you are interested in interoperable content management systems -- as either a user or a supplier -- then I encourage you to participate in this effort.

Just a year or two ago, a major upgrade to the Documentum ECM platform would have been dominant news in the industry, but things change, and quickly. D6, the latest version of EMC|Documentum's flagship platform, is undertaking a gradual roll-out through Q3 2007 to muted fanfare. EMC and its investors have high expectations for this new version, as the Documentum Content and Archiving division of the company has shown only modest growth of 5% year-over-year, lower than most competitors. At first blush D6 is a substantial upgrade to D5, consolidating many of the firm's acquisitions into a much more unified and standardized product set, and also boosting some areas, such as BPM and transactional document management capabilities. As announced at their recent developers' conference D6 also goes a long way to burnish the platform's previously quite dull SOA credentials, and improves developer productivity by standardizing on Eclipse

Many recent industry events have focused on the technologies or solutions areas that provide the best business opportunities for VARs. ECM continues to be counted as a top opportunity for solutions providers, with strong demand from several markets. According to Gartner, document imaging is among the top 10 CIO's technology priorities for 2007, and executives are projected to spend 3.6% more for ECM solutions this year. Used with permission from Business Solutions magazine