ECM Vendors

Today we released a major update to our Enterprise Content Management technology evaluations. Our release highlights some important trends, most notably some new mobile interfaces coming down the pike. Our team will share some more details about those trends in the coming weeks. Meantime, if you're a subscriber, you'll receive your updated edition shortly. If not, and you want the inside story on ECM vendor pros and cons, you can purchase the report here, and you can always check out a free sample first.

A report from TowerGroup titled "Beyond the Paper Scourge: Unleashing the Business Value of Electronic Content Management" was recently released on MarketResearch.com. The report covers topics such as: How ECM Works, Unleashing the Business Value of ECM, Innovation in ECM, Supporting Technologies for ECM, and Outlook for ECM Vendors.Some of the claims include:ECM enhances business value by improving operational efficiency, customer experience, compliance, and risk management.ECM spans diverse technology categories that fit together strategically under an umbrella of business process transformation.Many FSIs use some form of ECM solutions, but these solutions often do not connect with other supporting technologies and fall short of the mark in delivering full business value.Innovation in ECM lies in preserving information in its original digital form and in its ability to move information through a process, be stored, and be accessed digitally.

One of the questions at a "town hall" debate I facilitated at last month's Enterprise 2.0 conference addressed the topic of information lifecycle management for enterprise social spaces. Most of the attendees didn't seem to think it was necessary. I disagree. All information -- be it official enterprise documents or social content -- follows lifecycles, and you shouldn't just publish-and-forget, on your intranet or any public website. This same lifecycle mantra is promoted heavily by enterprise content management (ECM) vendors looking to get into the social computing game. But does that mean you should buy Social Software from your ECM vendor? I have my doubts. The end-goal is effective networking and collaboration, so any tools you acquire should still be measured foremost by that yardstick.

Everyone said that the Interwoven/Autonomy deal would only be the first in a series of big announcements within the enterprise content management world. And that it is.Today, Canadian-based enterprise content management vendor Open Text (news, site) has reached a deal to buy Vignette Corporation for US$ 310 million.Vignette is expected to become a wholly owned subsidiary of Open Text. The deal will see Vignette stockholders get US$ 8 per share plus 0.1447 of Open Text stock.

Today we updated our semi-famous "subway map" for 2009, expanding it out to 100 stations (among the 200 vendors we cover). From the accompanying release: "The most important characteristic of the technologies we cover is the sheer diversity of vendors, particularly when you account for regional differences..."

The ECM world is dominated by EMC, Open Text, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle -- all big vendors with equally big publicity machines to keep their brands and "story" right, front and center. But of interest to me these last couple of months has been the news from lesser-known vendors such as Nuxeo and SpringCM. Different news from each to be sure, but evidence that mid-market vendors should be watched closely by buyers as those suppliers often have a more resilient and detailed ECM strategy, they just don't have such big marketing machines to explain it with.

Open Text kicked off its global Content World conference today in Orlando, Florida. The ECM giant expects it to be the largest conference in history with more than 1500 participants registered to attend. Pre- and post-conference workshops, breakouts, training, GlobalStar awards, partner schmoozing, showcasing its ECM solutions, Universal Studios trips… Open Text is going to be busy in the next few days. The event features a conference-within-a-conference program. Attendees tailor their conference experience: product/technology-specific tracks are available in the morning, with broader enterprise views offered in the afternoon.

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.

Open Text Corporation, an enterprise content management vendor, pledged its support for the new Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard. The standard’s development is led by three major Enterprise Content Management (ECM) providers — EMC, IBM and Microsoft. Recap on CMIS CMIS is a new, open standard that will offer new ways for content applications to “talk” to content repositories. With the new standard, developers can write applications that can work with multiple repositories from different vendors, allowing users to access and organize information stored in different repositories through a single application and interface.

According to a comprehensive survey of banks and credit unions conducted by Cornerstone Advisors, Inc., the first quarter of 2008 shows that credit unions have embraced ECM more fully than banks. Of those institutions surveyed, 77 percent of credit unions responded that they had implemented an ECM solution, as compared to 55 percent of banks. Although success stories and mature vendor offerings are prevalent within the industry, many financial institutions have either yet to adopt an ECM system or have not utilized their system to its fullest potential. According to Cornerstone Advisors' findings, "When asked to rate ‘the level of adoption, acceptance, utilization, integration and mastery' of installed ECM solutions, on a scale of 1 to 5, banks responded with an average score of 3.5 and credit unions 3.7."

There's good reason whyleading resellers, vendors,distributors, andintegrators join AIIM, theinternational authority onEnterprise ContentManagement (ECM).AIIM is leading the way tothe understanding,adoption, and use of ECMtechnologies — the onesthat help you capture,manage, store, preserve,and deliver content insupport of businessprocesses.Let us connect you withECM partners.

CMS vendor GlobalSCAPE has released version 4 of its PureCMS product. At least in theory this update is supposed to resolve some of the product's workflow and usability shortcomings we identify in The CMS Report. More interestingly, it is further prove of falling price-feature ratios. From a functional standpoint, at the very low end of the marketplace (in this case, $380/seat) you can get real versioning, some workflow, and decent authoring -- even if the templating is a bit funky. We'll wait to see GlobalSCAPE's latest version in real production environments before saying more...

By Alan Pelz-Sharpe and Chris Harris-Jones Enterprise content management (ECM) has gained considerable credence in the market since its launch at AIIM AIIM 2001. AIIM even refers to itself now as the "Enterprise Content Management Association." Many of the content management software vendors focus on the idea that everyone in an organization needs access to unstructured (that is, non-database) content, and that all the content in the organization, whatever its source or purpose, should be managed by an ECM system.

After walking back from the financial brink, Day keeps advancing. As is the often the case, the most notable pieces of the latest release of its CMS, Communique 3.5, are a bit hidden. We think it's significant that the product is now architected to run in 3rd-party Appservers rather than a generic JVM (though you can still expect to see a lot of server-side ECMAScript under the covers). And WebDAV support makes it more contributor-friendly. Like FatWire, Day now ships its own IDE, too; just exactly why vendors do this remains something of a mystery to us...Read about the product

ECM suite vendor Stellent today announced that it had purchased digital rights management (DRM) software vendor, SealedMedia. Follows in the footsteps of its larger competitor, EMC|Documentum, who had purchased Authentica (a SealedMedia competitor) earlier this year. I said it then and still think so now: DRM and enteprise document management are a good match. One of the great benefits of formal CM systems is that they provide repository access controls, but that can't stop authorized users from downloading and sending files around the world on their own.

It should come as no surprise that CMS vendors are offshoring more development work. See, for example, this recent announcement from Interwoven about doubling its R&D work in India. Another trend, which has transpired quietly but steadily, has been to outsource first-line product support to South Asia as well. This has, predictably, led to some grumbling from customers in Europe and North America. Nevertheless, it's quite apparent that the global locus of ECM expertise is shifting eastward. CMS Watch contributing analyst Alan Pelz-Sharpe says that his firm, Wipro Technologies, boasts more than 1000 experienced content management specialists, most of them working on major projects for Global 2000 companies.

Nothing gets an entrepreneur juiced like the prospects of a big, soon-to-be-public player looking for an acquisition in their space. Such is the case in Australia, where longtime records management vendor TOWER Software is about to go public after flexing its wings over the past several years. Now TOWER is looking for a CMS vendor to buy, preferably an Aussie one. Let the beauty pageant begin! But the winner (and its customers) should be careful what they wish for: big ECM vendors want to check the Web CMS box, but don't often invest a lot in the technology going forward, once they come to see that Web content management remains largely a departmental exercise...Read about TOWER's plans

A commentator on Motley Fool delves into ECM vendor Hummingbird's recent financial performance and comes up lukewarm. More importantly, the piece shows how even equity analysts are sorely challenged to evaluate software company books after busy M&A activity. But we're not investment counselors. We care about you, the prospective technology buyer. And if you're concerned with your vendors' viability, we advise 2 things: trust your gut instincts about the strength of the underlying technologies (strong products endure mergers and acquisitions), and keep abreast of vendor cash levels (cash-poor vendors make desperate decisions)....

A fascinating reader survey from Intelligent Enterprise offers some insight into corporate thinking on enterprise content management. One datapoint of interest here: the emphasis on Web content management as an enterprise priority, which seems to endure from year to year (c.f. AIIM's surveys in 2003 and 2004). The other interesting finding -- pointed out by the ever-perceptive editor, Doug Henschen -- is that enterprises seem more interested in interface and user-experience consistency from the users' perspective, rather than outright vendor consolidation from the CIO's perspective. That sounds wise to us...

In its annual Expo now underway in New York City, AIIM (the "Enterprise Content Management Association") has once again laid out a surprisingly sumptuous banquet of exhibitors (500+) and conference tracks (5+) for visitors. But there are 2 ghosts haunting the halls of the Jacob Javits Center. The first one is Metadata: it props up every meaningful ECM solution, but vendors and architects rarely want to talk about it, perhaps because applying metadata at an enterprise level is so incredibly hard. The second ghost wafting uneasily among the expo aisles and corridors is Miscrosoft SharePoint, an almost viral doc management and portal solution for which the rest of the ECM organism has had only scant immunological response to date. Every ECM vendor has to ask: should we co-exist with SharePoint, or try to fight it?... Learn more about Metadata through AIfIARead about MS SharePoint