The $3.9 billion ECM market is consolidating with just five vendors competing globally at the enterprise level, according to Gavin Tay, one of the authors of Gartner’s 2011 Magic Quadrant for the Enterprise Content Management industry

While the big five - EMC, Hyland, IBM, Microsoft, OpenText and Oracle - have only inched ahead from their positions in 2010, niche players are continuing to  encroach on their space, says Singapore-based Tay, who will be presenting a session entitled Content Management: Strategies That Deliver Success at the 2011 Gartner Symposium being held at the Gold Coast Convention & Exhibition Centre from 14 - 17 November 2011.

In 2009, the ECM market grew by 5.1%; in 2010, it grew another 7.6% and was worth $3.9 billion; and Gartner estimates this growth will continue at a compound rate of 11.4% through 2015.

Tay believes the nimble approach to feature development by smaller niche ECM vendors is keeping the big guns on their toes, and the dynamic nature of the market makes it hard to compare with previous years.

“The Magic Quadrant is a snapshot in time,” said Tay. “Large vendors will continue to focus on an enterprise  solution, whereas some of the niche vendors are certainly introducing a lot of capabilities that are being requested.”

Gartner predicts a “coexistence strategy” for SharePoint and ECM, and also sees the Microsoft platform as a way to deal with enterprise collaboration for work in progress content

“A lot of organisations have got an immense number of ECM projects, and certain departments may have the autonomy to make decisions on which solution they want to use and IT goes about and procures them. 

“So they can end up with this whole proliferation of ECM solutions out there.  ECM as an infrastructure becomes a consideration then, and we are seeing organisations identify a single centre repository of truth, whether its a Documentum or FileNet or Oracle Web Centre, while SharePoint is providing  the end users with an intuitive interface which users, in their environment are comfortable with.

“From an office automation standpoint, SharePoint provides them an entry point where they can work with their daily documents or content in their respective categories and it does land up in that single central repository. “

Gatrner sees that there are still reletively few organisations to achieve the goal of Transactional Content Management, where correspondence, forms and applications are automatically digitised or captured and workflowed through the ECM platform

“it’s seldom used in that perspective and it is most often used as a replacement of their file servers,” said Tay.

“Although there has been an increasing use case scenario from the financial and insurance industries, they’re advancing in this area. They are building up electronic forms to capture information but now storing the entire case into the enterprise content management repository, along with a set of business processes to help provide synergies with internal processes as well as to facilitate better interaction with their clients. 

Gartner also notes that, in terms of geographies, while growth in use and deployment is global, the Asia-Pacific region is outstripping all others for document and records management, collaboration and knowledge management deployments.
In particular, this applies to verticals such as financial, insurance and legal in Singapore, Australia and China, all of which are building out customisations as composite content applications (CCAs) incorporating comprehensive workflows.

“The Asia Pac region is certainly an area of growth for ECM because of the regulatory compliance needs of the banking and insurance industries, and governments are certainly looking at that intently as well.”