The new line up for content management

Tag : Hardware Assortment

Once upon a time, it was all about the paperless office. Now, theenterprise content management (ECM) sector encompasses a broadrange of systems loosely connected by the promise to –finally – render an organisation’s information into asearchable, manageable, usable and compliant condition.
But the sheer quantity of data flowing into and through theenterprise environment, an amount growing by 60% every year, hasleft the ECM field so wide that no single vendor can possibly coverthe territory.
Integration and legacy application nightmares aside, this hasresulted in a chaotic array of small to medium-sized companiescompeting for their slice of the $2.9 billion (£1.47 billion)sector under the shadow of major industry players consolidatingtheir positions after a spate of acquisitions.
And then there is Microsoft. Having explored the market with a nearfree version in 2003, the software giant last year stepped firmlyinto the crowded ECM arena with SharePoint 2007 – anintuitive browser-based collaboration tool scalable from team toenterprise level – which has undercut most of the competitionin terms of price and carved itself a large slice of the market forbasic content services (BCS).
Doug Miles, managing director of AIIM (the internationalassociation of ECM companies) describes the arrival of the newSharePoint as “the biggest thing to hit our industry in2007”.
He says: “[SharePoint] 2003 had discrete apps and littleintegration with Outlook. With SharePoint 2007, users are movingfrom an Office to a SharePoint environment, often without evenknowing it.”
Key to SharePoint’s success, he believes, has been itsaccessibility to end users. “Users have day jobs. Theydon’t want to become experts in ECM,” he says.
His opinion is echoed in the observations of many ECM implementers,who report users ingeniously bypassing expensive, corporate ECMproducts in favour of simpler, more familiar tools.
Ease of use is certainly a major factor, but the key toSharePoint’s shake-up of the industry is its accessibility toIT. Any organisation with a Windows Server Client Access Licence(CAL) already has Windows SharePoint Services (WSS), saving IT fromhaving to build an ROI case and source budget for a major ECMinfrastructure roll-out. This in turn essentially extracts greatervalue from an existing investment. Fewer choices
Across the wider market, ECM is undergoing the kind ofconsolidation common to most maturing markets. Gartner’slatest ’Magic Quadrant’ for the industry suggests thatthe recent ’me-too’ spate of acquisitions among largevendors – including Oracle’s purchase of Stellent,IBM’s acquisition of FileNet, EMC’s Documentum buy-outand Open Text’s merger with Hummingbird – will mean“fewer choices for end-users and less opportunity forinnovation”.
However, if anything, the opposite seems to be occurring. Largervendors such as Interwoven, with the resources to do so, are tryingto innovate their way ahead of the pack by boosting functionalityin areas such as analytics, while mid-tier vendors such as HylandSoftware are escaping the SharePoint onslaught by focusing onspecialist areas such as finance and healthcare.
The grand doyen of document management, Xerox, makes a goodwindsock for the future of the industry. Traditionally strong incapture and document preparation technologies, and photocopyinghardware, Xerox plays in the content management market withDocuShare. But the company believes that the real dollars lieelsewhere – in the enterprise document services market.
Lastly come the new talent of the ECM sector: open sourceinnovators and companies like Alfresco and Nuxeo. Among the playersprepared to stand up directly to SharePoint, Alfresco is led bysome of ECM’s founding veterans and has already secured asurprising assortment of high-profile adopters, ranging fromgames-makers and major investment banks to government agencies.Theirs is likely to be a battle over the future of the softwaremodel as much as one about content management.