ECM Evolves, To What?
ECM Evolves, To What?
The ECM market has been facing a period of transition for some time now and its evolution is continuing to drive market change. So what do the pureplay vendors make of the advent of basic content management services (BCS) and the integration of open source into the market? By Angela Priestley
For end users ECM is ultimately a business strategy, yet its implementation can often be expensive and complicated. For these reasons, Gartner predicts the advent of basic content services to threaten the market, with recent acquisition activity cementing this prediction.
“As BCS offerings mature and expand their capabilities, they will present a significant challenge to well-established ECM technology vendors,” states the ECM Gartner Magic Quadrant Report, published in October 2006.
According to Gartner, the defining points of a BCS include cost, ease of deployment and integration as well as basic functionality. Ultimately they are products that include aspects of an ECM suite at a fraction of the price. It’s the growth of unstructured data at the enterprise level that is encouraging a shift towards basic content management features and services from software stack vendors such as IBM, Oracle, SAP and Microsoft. Stack vendors are finding a place in the market by offering BCS into their infrastructure platforms.
So when it comes to the pureplay vendors in the market, those vendors whose sole survival depends on ECM, are BCS offerings really a threat? Michael Cliff, marketing director at Tower Worldwide, believes there is some indication that BCS offerings are disrupting the ECM market, especially with the recent wave of consolidations. But in the end, BCS can actually open doors for ECM by basically ‘marketing’ document management. “There will be some organisations who are happy with those solutions, then there are those who want to extend it,” he says.
“There has been a lot of consolidation in the market and this perception the BCS is going to undermine the ECM market, but at the end of the day I think it creates a lot of opportunity,” says Cliff.
While some organisations may well see the benefits of combining a BCS with an extended ECM solution, could BCS undermine the importance of document retention and encourage end-users to seek out cheap and less functional solutions? “For some organisations, potentially yes. That’s why we have a relationship with Microsoft,” says Cliff. “But I wouldn’t go so far as to say it will cause huge problems retention wise, at the private level, it’s really up to them. Every organisation has to make decisions on what is important for managing information.”
Cliff is aware of the expectations of the ECM market that some analysts have made, yet believes Tower’s recent growth is evidence enough to prove them wrong.
“We continue to grow at more then double the rate of our particular market sector, despite the expectations of analysts,” he says, citing a 23 percent growth rate in 2006, an average met over the last five years.
But for Cliff, ECM is much more then a solution, instead it can be a business enabler. “We’ve noticed over the last six – twelve months, most organisations aren’t just looking for an ECM solution, they’re looking for a product that solves their problems,” he says. “What we’re doing is figuring out what businesses need and what is important to them…In the past, information has often been seen as a liability, but information can be an asset if managed correctly.”
The release of Microsoft SharePoint 2007 offers a massive improvement on the Microsoft’s 2003 offering and could be the prime basic content services product to emerge this year, especially for those seeking a simplified document management solution. “I think if you’re in a pure play Microsoft environment, it would be a great tool,” says Tony Wall, CEO of Objective. “For the most part, SharePoint is good for collaborative purposes, but it’s not good for recordkeeping, compliance, etc.”
David Schulz, development manager, Avand says SharePoint will no doubt make its mark on the information management landscape, though it’s realistically a tool to suit the needs of small organisations with simple record keeping needs. “For most organisations though, there is the risk of a rapid proliferation of SharePoint sites each with inconsistent metadata schemas and no ability to search across them without further investment in the SharePoint technologies to federate the searches,” he says.
“The ECM program within organisations has been primarily one of identifying information silos within the organisation and incorporating them into the corporate system in a consistent fashion and SharePoint has the potential to undo this,” says Schulz.
Schulz believes that at the outset, the marketing strategy of Microsoft for SharePoint and many of the BCS offerings appears to envision an explosion of workgroup repositories that at some point, will need to all be brought together. “It is easy to envisage an organisation quickly ending up with a lot of information silos that are not consistent with each other and not corporately searchable,” says Schulz.
Another factor to interrupt the ECM market could be the advent of commododised open source solutions such as Alfresco. But Objective can’t agree, believing that open source solutions still permit far too much risk for enterprises. “There are a number of open source offerings but I’ve never come across a competitive one in the market. I’m not saying they’re not likely to come up,” he says. “Open source solutions just move the risk from the front of the cycle to the back of the cycle, as established vendors we mitigate risk across the whole cycle.”
ECM might be in a period of transition, but it’s also a period of evolution, one that could not only bring prosperity to the pureplay vendors but also to end-users alike. “It’s only natural that we will continue to evolve,” says Wall.
For Objective, such evolution involves focusing on the market, sticking to their competencies and innovating. “We’re not out there buying companies, trying to make
some Frankenstein product, what we do is innovate,” says Walls. “While the rest of the world is out there tearing houses down, we’re innovating, aggressively investing in innovation.”
Tower Software’s ECM evolution over the next few years involves “completing strategic acquisitions bot technical and business that will increase market share and provide added value to the market, increasing our re-investment in software development and out people and opening new offices throughout North America and EMEA.” But overall, Cliff expects the content management market to grow and to continue to evolve as one of the most critical factors of an organisation’s success. He also envisions a “continued consolidation of vendors with the emergence of significant new players and vendors looking to provide business process solutions that will support the concept of ECM.”
Ultimately it’s a question of risk especially with compliance factors coming into play, and one that ECM vendors seek to address. “Most organisations in Australia understand what is required of them. They’re looking at solutions that will mitigate their risk,” says Cliff. Meanwhile for Avand, it’s a matter of seeking and maintaining long-term relationships with their client base and offering a consistent and reliable commitment to their needs.