Asia-Pac leads growth in EDM
Asia-Pac leads growth in EDM
A new report from AIIM reveals that the document technologies market will grow to $US41.6 billion by 2003.
The Asia-Pacific document management industry is showing twice as much growth as the US and Europe, according to a report commissioned by the Association for Information and Image Management International (AIIM) from the Gartner Group.
The report, "State of the Document Technologies Industry: 1997-2003", predicts that the EDM market will witness a combined compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 26 per cent to grow from US$13.2 billion in 1998 to $US41.6 billion in 2003.
Of the 990 organisations surveyed, many reported that their expenditure on Web content management applications had doubled from 1997 to 1998.
Although KM and electronic commerce showed great initial interest, the respondents clearly identified existing IT issues, such as compliance initiatives and Y2K, as more important in the short term.
Findings revealed that the document technologies market, including hardware, software, maintenance and supporting services, is rapidly becoming commoditised, with the increase in the total number of users affected by these technologies, growing much faster than revenues.
The highest technology segment growth rates were for document component management (63 per cent) and integrated systems (74 per cent).
The slowest growing technology segments are film-based imaging (the only technology with a negative growth rate at 11 per cent) and production imaging at seven per cent. All other technologies are forecasted to grow between 21 per cent and 42 per cent.
Forecasts show that document repository management and production imaging, the largest revenue technology sectors in 1998, will also be the leaders in 2003.
Services were found to represent the largest revenue-generating category with approximately 40 per cent of total revenues. Software was the next largest category, followed by hardware and maintenance, which represent only about 10 per cent of annual revenues.
KEY MARKETS FOR EDM
Financial services is the largest vertical sector, with approximately 20 per cent of the total revenues. Insurance, government, banking, and manufacturing account for the next largest share of revenues (approximately 15 per cent each).
Excluding other, the smallest vertical market sectors are utilities and telecommunications, transportation, and health care and pharmaceuticals.
The dominant regions are, and will continue to be, the US and Europe. The US generates almost twice the revenues of Europe. However, Asia/Pacific is growing at approximately twice the rate (51 per cent versus 23 per cent for both the US and Europe. The rest of the world is also growing faster at 29 per cent. By 2001, the Asian economies are expected to have recovered to the extent that they will have made up for slower spending in the earlier years.
The technology expenditure patterns of the US and Europe are similar, except for document component management, where US expenditures are only 8 per cent of the total and European expenditures are 21 per cent. In the Asia/Pacific region, expenditures for COLD/enterprise report management are much lower than the US and Europe (8 per cent vs. 23 per cent and 29 per cent respectively). Conversely, Asia/Pacific expenditures for workflow and IDM-document repository management are noticeably higher than in the US and Europe.
According to the report, substantial increases in interest in workflow and document repository solutions appeared in Asia/Pacific region. In all three regions, expenditures for film-based imaging account for the smallest shares, ranging from 15 per cent to 4 per cent.