Enterprise content management (ECM) is something of a catch-all term used to describe a set of technologies that capture, manage, preserve and deliver information to support business processes. Recently, however, many vendors are claiming to be able to provide a single, integrated platform capable of meeting every organisation’s content management needs. But are these ECM suites really as functionally rich as is being promised?

Today’s businesses are generating unprecedented volumes of unstructured data, from emails to reports to voice mails. This is a goldmine of organisational information, and one that the regulatory environment demands is rigorously managed. The need for an integrated ECM suite is immediately apparent; what is less clear is whether a single suite can today fulfil that requirement.

A quick checklist highlights some of the technologies that may go into an ECM suite: including document management (DM), web content management (WCM), document imaging, records management (RM), digital asset management (DAM), media asset management (MAM), collaboration and COLD (Computer Output to Laser Disk) technologies.

But assembling such a list is a trivial task; providing the deep integration necessary to ensure all components work together seamlessly is far more complex.

Starting points

As an industry, the ECM market evolved from vendors offering a series of point solutions, each aimed at tackling specific enterprise requirements, such as WCM. But over the last four years, a wave of consolidation has brought those technologies together and reshaped the competitive landscape.

Since 2002, there have been more than 40 mergers and acquisitions of ECM vendors, says Tom Eid, research vice president at IT adviser Gartner. And as consolidation continues, over half of the entire ECM market is now controlled by the top four companies, he says.

It has mostly been the smaller, pure-play vendors offering niche solutions that have been snapped up by the larger players, as they seek to flesh out their product offerings and extend their customer base. Yet even the larger vendors are keeping a cautious eye on the rapidly changing ECM market, aware that they too are not immune from an acquisition attempt.

“The reason we don’t sleep is there is IBM with 400,000 employees on one side of us, and EMC with 100,000 employees on the other,” says Lee Roberts, chairman and CEO of FileNet, an enterprise content management heavyweight placed amongst the top five ECM vendors worldwide.

The consolidation makes picking an ECM vendor a difficult and complex task: There may be a temptation to assume that the larger vendors, in particular, are at less risk of a takeover, but do they have the all of the required technologies?

“You have to assume that there are a large number of vendors out there who will not exist in any thing like the form in which they exist today,” says Tony Heywood, EMEA senior vice president at content management vendor Hummingbird. “Therefore, in a consolidating market, the longevity of the vendor is perhaps the most important factor.”

Hummingbird executives are well placed to comment on market conditions, given its recent tribulations. In May 2006, Hummingbird’s executives recommended a $465 million takeover bid from private equity investors Symphony Technology Group. The rationale was that by retreating from the spotlight of quarterly financial reporting, the company would be better able to plan for the longer term.

But the agreement was not well received by all shareholders, and Hummingbird subsequently became the subject of a hostile bid from rival Open Text. At the time of writing, this issue had not been resolved.

The Hummingbird story gives an insight into how the wave of consolidation is affecting the buyers. Despite the pressing demand for ECM technology, overall the growth in software sales stalled in 2005, says Gartner’s Eid. The Hummingbird executives are not alone in being spooked by that apparent sales slowdown.

PRODUCT INTEGRATION

While mergers, acquisitions and takeovers are hugely disruptive, it is the integration of different product sets that will occupy the vendors for years to come.

“The vendor consolidation and acquisition strategy has meant that many of the vendors left can offer a wide range of what is regarded as ECM functionality”, says John Horton, global practice director for ECM at technology provider Getronics. “However, the integration of many of the technology components is often incomplete when you drill down into the detail needed for implementation,” he says.

One reason for this is that each vendor’s heritage has given it strengths and weaknesses in particular types of content, be that emails, scanned documents or web content. But, says Kyle McNabb, a senior analyst at market watcher Forrester Research, an integrated ECM platform needs to be able deal with more than just different content types, it needs to be able to provide the context in how that content is used.

For example, back-office processes are driven by transactional content; business content is used within the enterprise; and persuasive content influences and changes external audience behaviours.

And while there is a need for organisations to manage all of these categories of content, “ECM vendors aren’t equally good at all dimensions of content,” he says. Choosing an ECM platform requires a recognition of the dominant category of content within the organisation – as Kyle defines them transactional, business or persuasive – and picking a vendor accordingly.

STANDARD CONTENT

However, there is an alternative approach for dealing with content access. The JSR 170 Java standard promises to provide universal access to content repositories in the same way that SQL opened up the relational database. Potentially, the management of content types and content categories could become much easier.

However, the standard has some way to go before being adopted as a universal standard. And vendors are still pursuing the development and sale of their own proprietary content repositories, primarily as a way of winning market share.

“Our industry is very good at creating multiple, competing standards,” says Hummingbird’s Heywood. But there has been a move towards homogenising where possible, such as on the user interface level, the data repository level, and the web services level, he says.

 But while the standards argument is being thrashed out amongst vendors, there remains a wide gap between customers’ expectations of what an ECM platform can do, and what the products can actually deliver. And as the ECM market continues to mature, organisations will have to truly understand what their business requirements are before standardising their content management platform around a single vendor.

“I think there is a race on to ‘own’ a particular vertical segment or horizontal use-case,” says Tony Byrne at CMS Watch. “I don’t see major ECM vendors disappearing outright, but rather specialising, whether they like it or not. The key question for a buyer then becomes: how will my supplier specialise, and in what?

While this is happening, the vision of an all-encompassing ECM suite remains tantalisingly elusive.

Further reading in Information Age

ECM for the masses - Information Age, March 2006

Connected content - Information Age, March 2006

The power of the platform - Information Age, February 2006

Elevated status - Information Age, July 2005

Content congestion - Information Age, May 2004

More articles can be found in the Information Management Briefing Room