Key Trends in Enterprise Content Management

Consolidation, Integrationand Virtualization

Clearly, consolidation has been a trend on the vendor side of the market in that every major vendor (Stellent, Interwoven , Vignette, EMC, IBM, Hu mmingbird, FileNet, Open Text) has grown functionally and financially as a result of acquisitions. However, consolidation is also a factor among end users, part i c u l a r l y those within large organizations that own a plethora of ECM applications. Their mission is typically to reduce the number of vendors they deal with, decrease costs of maintenance, development and training, and make it easier for those that need to obtain information to get it. IT leaders have slowly been able to convince business management (and other senior management) that enterprise content management capabilities should be treated like infrastructure in terms of investment (i.e., shared services, leverage, etc.), in part due to compliance needs as well as the cost savings potential of owning fewer ECM assets. Resulting winners, or strategic vendors, tend to be those that have built out their asset portfolios over the past few years and are also on an appropriate architectural path moving forw a rd. Oracle and Microsoft represent specters lurking in the background as both (Oracle more near term than Microsoft) shore up their ECM capabilities. Vendors in other ECM areas (e.g., document imaging/capture, search, etc.) have also been acquisitive of late.

Most vendors are just beginning to see cross-selling benefits associated with consolidating the various ECM technologies. While users now more readily accept that document management and web content management (WCM) go well together, for example, and they can also see the value of linking digital asset management (DAM) to WCM, it’s harder to move from document imaging to DAM, from e-mail archive to document management, electronic output management to document management, etc. Still, some vendors have had success introducing records management into traditional document management and imaging environments (e.g., FileNet, Stellent), and this is likely to help them establish additional beachheads in their accounts.

It is important to note, however, that the consolidation described above typically does not mean data or content consolidation, which is often too expensive to pursue given translation, hardware, development, storage, and other changes required. Instead, organizations will pursue content integration and ultimately virtualization, investing in technologies that federate various sources of content and make them available to users and applications with less cost and difficulty. Further, this capability will enable technology groups to apply policies (e.g., usage, storage, retention, disposition) to disjointed or “unmanaged” information assets on file servers/shares, repositories,and even those under management but within different platforms around the organization. IBM and others have made investments and acquisitions in this space, and as the overlap of unstru c t u red (or semi-structured) and structured information continues, we expect there to be increased activity among enterprise information integration (EII), metadata management, search, and business intelligence vendors. And while standards across this area are becoming more common (e.g., JSR-170, JSR-168, WebDAV), proprietary methods will continue to be required to deliver the most robust function

Managing Risk and Deriving Value

The developments above hint at a goal that most organizations are realizing they must have: to ascertain the value and/or risk inherent in the information they already possess. Determining risk is obviously important considering the litany of regulations with which many organizations must comply. Indeed, regulated and public companies have begun to approach compliance and regulation much more holistically than in the past, seeking to consolidate and focus management, process automation, search, and records management facilities and apply them across their compliance domains. Additionally, determining information value, while it smacks of the knowledge management desires of yesteryear, is key to being able to leverage experience and drive revenue through product and service development.

Many organizations have provided their users with access to file servers, Notes/Domino databases, Sharepoint servers, etc. such that all sorts of information now exist across enterprises. The problem is that there is no “catalog” for this information; rarely, if ever, does anyone know how many versions, forms, copies, etc. of a given document might be out there, even when usage policies are established and electronic tools disseminated. Thus, the ability to virtually “reach in” to these stores, figure out what is there, perhaps attach some metadata to it, and apply electronic policies to the information to f o rtify its management is quite import a n t . Additionally, “mining” the information – along with data that relates to it but that resides within applications, data warehouses, etc. – will help users to make better decisions about products, customers, etc. Today, much of that work is done informally through portals put in place to marry user roles with various types of information. In the near future, composite applications will be built that will be role, process, security, metadata, etc. aware and that will provide much stronger contextual relevance for information more easily than is available today.

“Any-to-Any” Publishing

With the advent of XML as a neutral language, descriptor, and/or intermediate format, both vendors and (more slowly) users have begun to realize that they can more comfortably author in the applications of their choice and more easily have their information published to a wide variety of formats and locales. T h o u g h Microsoft has been hinting at the ability to “round trip” documents for quite some time and has made significant internal investments in XML, users must still look at other providers for complex (large, sophisticated, or voluminous documents) or multi-platform publishing needs.

Many organizations desire to publish information about products, services, regulations, etc. to a variety of platforms (paper, Internet , extranet, etc.). Additionally, there are often transformations and translations required, there may be regulatory issues (viewing, security, privacy, retention, etc.) and there is typically a desire to control costs and leverage content more effectively. Further, the need to drive the creation and management of documents such as maintenance and service manuals, standard operating procedures (SOPs), material safety data sheets (MSDS), regulatory filings, etc. in a more automated fashion is forcing the likes of the ERP, SCM, PLM, and other application vendors closer to the ECM vendors. XML essentially provides the path for this to happen, and Parametric Technology’s acquisition of ArborText in July is perhaps a harbinger of what is to come. This capability will slowly but surely permeate the broader ECM space, including document automation/composition (where it is already in force), output management, web content management, and other areas.

Applications, Solutions, and Vertical Focus

IBM is already in ECM in a big way (its Content Manager collection tops ECM revenue among all vendors in the space); Microsoft, with Sharepoint Portal Server (SPS), is in ECM through the back door, so to speak; and rounding out the major infrastructure vendors, Oracle has finally released its Content Services capabilities, essentially low cost, database oriented document and records management functionality. With these platform players in the game, many other ECM vendors have seen the writing on the wall – they won’t themselves be enterprise platform providers forever. While it certainly won’t be the case that Microsoft or Oracle, for example, will displace Documentum, FileNet, etc. in high value applications, they will certainly eat away at the low end and increasingly gain share elsewhere in enterprises (Microsoft claims millions of seats/licenses for SPS, though implementations generally tend to be relatively small in terms of repositories; Or a c l e’s Content Services will list at about $50/seat – compare that with the hundreds of dollars per seat typically charged by ECM vendors).

With this in mind, other vendors have done several things. They’ve invested in integration and virtualization capabilities as noted above, in part to remain “connected” to various implementations in an organization as well as to try to cross sell capabilities. However, they’ve also begun to focus in earnest on specific horizontal and vertical applications to be built upon their platforms or those of others (again, by virtue of their investment in integration capabilities).

Several vendors have developed or purchased traditionally in this manner (EMC/ Documentum, Open Text, Interwoven , Hummingbird, FileNet). This focus will drive purchases not only of software products but also services capabilities that are focused in a particular market (e.g., Stellent and eOnehundred). Note, however, that this does mean a focus on smaller deals for the vendors; indeed, it is a means to win the hearts of business users with increasingly more spending clout relative to IT, but to do so through a combined solution/platform approach that should be acceptable and appealing for others in the organization given the consolidation trend noted earlier.