The enterprise content management (ECM) market is witnessing continued upward growth, with gradually increasing market revenue anticipated in the current year and over the next few years, according to a new report from Frost & Sullivan.

Frost & Sullivan expects that the overall global ECM revenue will grow from $US2,750 million in 2011 to reach $US7,919.5 million by 2017.

The top five revenue earners in 2011 - OpenText, EMC, Oracle, IBM, and HP (Autonomy). -  accounted for more than 80 percent of ECM market revenue.

The analyst firm  defines an ECM as a large-scale, multi-functional, cross-platform content management system (CMS), designed to address the complex content management needs of enterprise-level organisations.

Today's ECM solutions are structural platforms meant to enable and deliver content efficiencies on a wide scale and with the express intent of energising digital content assets throughout their life cycles.

An ECM platform helps companies create a uniform communications layer or a reference architecture layer designed to facilitate cross-platform interoperability, data sharing, and anytime, anywhere secure access to critical company information and content. Many ECM solutions allow for real-time collaboration, massive customisation, and content management schemes that empower knowledge workers on a global scale.

Frost & Sullivan has observed that as the industry has rallied around ECM as a productivity architecture and solution, the market is embracing ECM more assertively than before, and growth trends look very positive.