ECM market

A new CMS Watch eport shows the growing importance of Enterprise Content Management in an increasingly mobile world. Blame the BlackBerry or the iPhone, but a generation of users are expecting all the data they are used to seeing on the desktop to be available on their mobile devices as well. This evolution in working style frames part of the 2009 ECM report from CMS Watch that highlights the move to mobile. If you want to understand the ECM market, then CMS Watch's 436 report is a very good place to start. Featuring 10-20 page reports on each of the major ECM vendors, it is designed to help readers save money on contracts, save time when shortlisting and choosing vendors, and prevent purchasing mistakes.

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.

Nuxeo announced recently the launch of their Galaxy Program, a new and innovative program designed for application and solution providers in the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) space. More than a traditional partner program, the Galaxy Program enables business and field experts the ability to package their knowledge and offer vertical solutions and applications, called Content-Enabled Vertical Applications (CEVAs), to their customers as well as to the broader, ever growing Nuxeo community. Nuxeo, as well as leading industry analysts and thought leaders, consider CEVAs as the next major step in the evolution of the ECM market. A CEVA is an application solving an actual business problem in the information management space, merging content, documents, business logic, business processes, regulatory rules and supporting tools. A CEVA focuses on content and is specialized to directly meet the needs of a specific industry or sector. To address this opportunity, Nuxeo has created this comprehensive program to meet the targeted business needs of the customers.

Earlier this week, I blogged about ECM and Open Source -- and the different landscapes buyers will encounter in the Enterprise Content Management marketplace versus the Web Content Management marketplace. I think there's a similar paradigm when it comes to SaaS (Software as a Service). For web content management, there are a plethora of choices including the most significant players that we evaluate in our Web CMS research: CrownPeak, Clickability, and OmniUpdate.

And so it has started. The end of the year is upon us and everyone is thinking about what's ahead for 2009. Independent analyst firm CMS Watch has offered up their predictions for the coming year. If the results of how they faired with last year's predictions are any indication, we may all do well to pay attention. Like the 12 days of Christmas, CMS Watch has chosen to offer up 12 predictions for the technology world for 2009.

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.

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).

Research and Markets has announced the addition of the "Document and Records Management: Controlling Information Risk and Aiding Compliance" report to their offering. Many early Document and Records Management (DRM) deployments were rolled out at the departmental level as point solutions to address a single issue. Now these organisations are extending their deployments enterprisewide to address compliance requirements or to deliver an integrated information management strategy.

Today I'm proud to announce the release of the 2009 edition of The ECM Suites Report. Expanded out to over 400 pages, I believe this constitutes the most comprehensive ECM product evaluation report of its kind. In this edition we have added some new vendors, dropped some old, and revised all 30 product reviews. This churn reflects a vibrant and extremely healthy global ECM market. As we note in today's press release, there probably has never been a better time for buyers, with a wide range of strong products to chose from, especially in the mid market.

September this year sees an early start to the conference season, and I find myself first in the Netherlands and then off to India. As always I hope you can join me at one of these events. On the 17th September I will be in Utrecht to run a workshop on ECM & SharePoint at the HartmanEVENT 08, I keynoted at a predecessor to this in 2007 and very much look forward to the return visit. From there I head to Bangalore and Mumbai. First for the BT Summit in Bangalore on the 23/24th, where I will be talking about ECM & SOA, and E-mail Archiving, and running a workshop on ECM product selection - and then flying onto Mumbai for 26th for the Executive Edition of the event, where I will be providing a critical analysis of the current ECM marketplace.

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.

In order to continue their endeavor to offer the best service to customers and gain a competitive edge over their competition, Programmer's Investment Corporation (PIC) decided to implement an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system. This would allow them to improve productivity while reducing costs. Submitted by Integrated Document Technologies, Inc.

Microsoft has quickly created a major presence in the enterprise content management (ECM)market with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. To help IT managers assess SharePoint asan ECM platform, we turned to Tisson Mathew, Chief Technology Officer at Aivea, an ITConsulting firm with deep Microsoft technologies experience. Submitted by Aivea Corporation

An abundance of ECM (enterprise content management) solutions geared to SMBs have poured into themarketplace. With all these options, how do you choose the ECM package that's right for you? Used with permission from Integrated Solutions magazine

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...

Today we released the ECM Suites Report 2008, evaluating 32 Enterprise Content Management vendors. ECM shoppers should be encouraged by the potential bargains they might find in 2008 ECM marketplace, but once implemented, they need to be careful that their ECM systems not become a virus within their enterprise. You can download a free chapter, which includes our review of Oracle's Universal Content Management suite. If you are a full subscriber, you should receive your copy shortly; if you're a previous report buyer, you'll receive an e-mail a bit later this week outlining discount eligibility.

ECM Connection recently had the opportunity to speak with Andrew Pery, Kofax' VP of marketing, to get more information about the DES and how it will impact business end users. Submitted by Kofax

Today we released of the ECM Suites Report. It evaluates 30 Enterprise Content Management vendors from 5 continents (yes, the marketplace is international). One of the report's more interesting findings was the extent of dislocation today among major vendors. From our press release: Some of the biggest Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Suite vendors are experiencing the most change right now, and therefore, customers' erstwhile "safest" bets might also carry significant near-term risks. A special thanks goes out to the scores of customers and consultants who contributed to our research.