Last Man Standing

Liam Tung explores the enterprise content management shake-up

It is interesting how discourse shapes reality. That the term ECM or enterprise content management is now common parlance amongst analysts, journalists and vendors alike would suggest that someone out there is actually ‘doing ECM’. Yet, as one sales person from an ECM vendor recently said, few organisations will ever request a quote for ECM. Rather, as Gartner’s Mark Gilbert points out, ECM is ‘an architectural vision’ that still eludes most organisations but equally offers a strategy to achieve comprehensive content management.

Customers around the world tend to focus on one business need at a time; say document and records management or digital asset management, while others will look for web content management or even a document imaging solution. Nonetheless, ECM has become a useful concept to depict a set of technologies designed to meet the complex environments in which content is created, shared and managed, if only as a goal that may one day be achieved.

For vendors ECM is still real enough to make some serious strategic moves to secure their future in it. Other than the recent spate of acquisitions, perhaps the most anticipated addition to the ECM fold is the release of SharePoint 2007. Gartner placed Microsoft in the prized leader’s quadrant and there is speculation that document and records management functionality will be subsumed by ‘infrastructure’ players, suggesting a real shift in how this type of functionality will likely be sold in the future.

Asked about Microsoft’s market strategy for SharePoint 2007, Ovum analyst Mike Davis argues, “I think Microsoft is not at all going lightly into the ECM market. Office 2007 is ECM like. The functionality with SharePoint Server, offers a system which they hope will become a central repository for documents created within Office 2007. That repository is doing what pure play vendors were doing ten years ago with all the collaborative and workflow features. What it doesn’t have however is records management functionality. Although they say they can, it’s not certified.”

Tony Wilkinson, Microsoft Australia’s Director of Information Worker Business Group, disagrees with Davis’ comments about its strategy and is evasive on the issue of records management. Asked how Microsoft intends on approaching this territory, he says, “It really depends on the environment the customer has. Some will have an existing electronic records management system and there will be some who don’t. We think that we will work with other vendors towards greater integration.”

Wilkinson prefers to talk about the release of SharePoint in terms of Microsoft’s new focus on ‘organisational’ rather than ‘personal’ productivity. Arguing that Microsoft is ‘People Ready’, Wilkinson sings praise for people: “People are the centre of success. Companies don’t innovate, people do. If you can amplify the effect of those people, you can also amplify the success of that organisation.”

Of course, the other release Wilkinson talks about is Exchange 2007. With the 64-bit architecture provided in Exchange 2007 environments, organisations will be liberated from .PST files and will have much larger storage capacities. Wilkinson points out that besides SharePoint, Exchange will also have records management functionality for email. This, no doubt, will create interest as controlling and archiving the growing volume of email continues to pose major problems for many organisations from both a storage point of view and compliance.

Wilkinson offers the example of a group working on a merger and acquisition. He says, “If you’re working on an M&A, you will be able to go to the M&A folder and pre-set retention policies for that folder, improving compliance and demonstrating how you got to that end-point.”

According to Wilkinson, Microsoft has “lowered the barriers to entry” for its 2007 range. He says, “SharePoint is easily pre-packaged so that customers can do without customisation. We’re putting in place a solution that IT can use as a platform to roll out multiple solutions and we want to provide core needs and a platform that they can provision to users the next tier down. The important thing will be to make sure we have provided a robust infrastructure so you can create a well managed solution but at the same time are empowered to go beyond what IT has provided.”

Pushing the limits

But Davis maintains that Microsoft’s key partners such as Meridio, UniqueWorld, Didata and IBS will be more than instrumental in rolling out SharePoint to customers requiring true records management functionality. Davis points out, “The key requirements for document management functionality are version control and the ability to check documents in and out of the system. Records management on the other hand needs the ability for declaration and disposition. For Microsoft to offer true records management capability, it partners with Meridio - which incidentally recently won the contract for the British Department of Defence - Open Text, which now owns Hummingbird, or Stellent. All of these pure play vendors offer the records management element that sits behind.

So, if you create a document in Office you can save it to a Share Point Server; if you need collaboration and some workflow it’s OK, however if you need true records management, then you need a second system to sit behind it.”

An interesting proposition raised by Davis, which was echoed by Gartner’s Phil Gilbert at the 2006 Sydney Symposium, is that SharePoint could instigate an explosion of disparate information repositories.

“While SharePoint Server is essentially a box for holding documents, Share Point Team Services comes out of the box with 2007 desktop. It will allow small groups to create records management functionality. This is interesting because it could lead to an explosion of work group repositories. The one analogy I can find for this is when people discovered you could do this with Lotus Notes; then it exploded.”

Davis contends this is not an unintended consequence, arguing that “Microsoft hopes there will be many SharePoint implementations within an organisation, which they can then go in and aggregate into a larger system.”

Using a system by one of the traditional ECM vendors such as Open Text, Davis argues, is different. “Rather than aggregating, it would say you can use Open Text Library because it has federated server management, which enables you to control multiple repositories, bringing this back under corporate control.

A phenomenon that has occurred when work groups work on a project is information would be stored in a repository specific to that group. Some of this information could be very important to the organisation, but when people finished the project the repository would be deleted, which has had two consequences: nobody can find anything and nobody can control it.”

With this problem in mind, search is yet fast becoming a major influence on the ECM market. As information piles up endlessly across structured and unstructured data repositories, organisations are looking for ways to reign in unwieldy silos. Evidence of this can be seen through recent alliances between Google and Oracle with Yellow Box being pointed at internal information sources. Local Australian search vendors in this arena include ISYS as well as WebWombat. IBM recently announced its offer of a ‘free’ enterprise OmniFind search tool in conjunction with Yahoo!, which can index up to 500,000 documents while Microsoft has released Office 2007 SharePoint Server for Search, known as MOSS.

Self defence

However Microsoft’s arsenal of SharePoint, Exchange and Search Server (MOSS), are not the only factors causing concern or opening up new choices for customers. As mentioned earlier, the spate of M&As that occurred in the past months have caused some concern amongst existing customers. The root of this concern is driven by fears that existing product lines will not be supported post-acquisition. Many say this is likely to occur where an acquired company doesn’t offer the acquirer any new technological strength. Interestingly, the respective acquisitions by OpenText and IBM of Hummingbird and FileNet fit this situation according to Forrester’s January 2006 report on Content-Centric Applications (written by Kyle McNabb well before these acquisitions) with each acquired company sharing similar strengths. The only instance where a new set of technologies was introduced was the Oracle/Stellent acquisition. Since then, there have been no major announcements and Stellent appears to be still operating as an independent unit in Australia.

In the instance of IBM and FileNet, both companies offer strong document imaging, BPM and transactional content applications. For OpenText/Hummingbird the reports says they share very similar strengths in “business content centric applications” for key verticals like legal, finance and the public sector, document imaging and business content (i.e. document management, records management, and team collaboration), while both lacked strong BPM offerings according to the report.

To allay concerns about the future support of Hummingbird’s E-Docs document and records management systems, days before Christmas 2006, OpenText made an announcement to US audiences. At OpenText’s 2006 LiveLinkUp conference in the U.S., it reaffirmed its commitment to Livelink ECM-eDOCS (formerly Hummingbird Enterprise) by aligning the offering with the new capabilities Open Text is rolling out in Livelink ECM 10, the latest version of its ECM suite.

"With the plans we're announcing today,” said Kirk Roberts, Executive Vice President of Products, Solutions and Marketing, “ECM-eDOCS customers will be able to maximize the value of their investments and plan an ECM strategy that meets the needs of their organizations over the long term.”

It’s still short of a hundred percent commitment but is a statement that would comfort Hummingbird’s customers. On this matter though, Davis says, “Don’t worry! Experience shows that existing products have been supported very well after previous mergers or acquisitions.”

He suggests the OpenText/Hummingbird deal was more of strategic defensive move to fend of SAP. “Open Text and Hummingbird were still very small compared to Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and SAP. Open Text knew it was a target for take over by SAP, with SAP being the one large player that doesn’t offer EDRM functionality for the reports it generates through its ERP systems. Open Text was vulnerable and so the logic was to get bigger, plus it was a good strategic decision because Hummingbird has interesting technologies and of course a good customer base.

Situations like this cause excitement in the market. Filenet, Stellent and Interwoven were very excited about the uncertainty caused by this. This was a major risk for OpenText when it acquired Hummingbird. Now IBM recognised it needed to offer more functionality and so purchased FileNet. After this, Oracle was the only one without EDRM, so it purchased Stellent.”

Davis says that Sarbanes Oxley has changed the rules for SAP, which “has a level of content management capability, but it could do with a RM solution to store information generated by its ERP systems. Core data in reports from organisations’ transactional systems mean it needs to put into a certified records management solution.”

This, speculates Davis, may explain the recent announcement of a partnership between SAP and OpenText to provide DoD certification for SAP and he warns “there is potential for Open Text to be acquired by SAP.”

Whether Microsoft and other ‘infrastructure’ vendors absorb various components of ECM into their offerings, the world will have to wait and see. It’s just as likely that as Office, SharePoint and Exchange are rolled out across the globe, there will be more content in more places for people to manage, and a continued need for solutions offered by traditional ECM vendors to help organisations work towards the ‘architectural vision’ of enterprise content management.

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