Coping with Content

Alaa Owaineh, technology analyst at Datamonitor, discusses some of the issues surrounding enterprise content management.

As companies produce – and need to manage – more digital content, demand for ECM solutions is on the increase. The ECM landscape is drastically changing and is being driven by a number of factors, according to industry analyst Alaa Owaineh. “Regulations increasingly demand that companies keep their records, e-mails and audit trails along with customer records,” he says. “In addition, the importance of online channels is also playing a significant role. This is particularly important in areas like retail banking, media and the retail sector where online channels are becoming more central to the business. Companies are more aware that a lot of their knowledge assets are stored in unstructured ways – e-mails, people’s files, people’s desktops – and therefore enterprises are looking for ways to tap into this. ECM can help.”

Owaineh believes organisations are becoming savvier to the benefits of these solutions. The bottom line is that such tools can help to increase overall profitability and effectiveness at an organisation. “One element of this is knowledge management and making sure that the intellectual property – the knowledge of people that work in the company that accumulates in e-mails and unstructured data on their desktop or shared folder on the network – is accessible to everyone at the organisation,” he says. “Another benefit is how it helps with risk, avoiding a breach of regulation and complying with government requirements. Also, it ensures that there are clear audit trails to whatever the organisation does, especially on the financial side. ECM has a lot of value in terms of making sure that all the necessary data is available to the right people, ensuring that the lack of access to content doesn’t hurt enterprises’ bottom line.”

A recent wave of consolidation means that the market is very much dominated by the big vendors. “Companies such as EMC and IBM, for instance, provide a robust ECM platform that provides all the general features, but they also allow third parties to build applications for these platforms – vertical applications for specific industries or applications for specific uses and scenarios,” says Owaineh. “These vendors are becoming more and more powerful. They are increasing their impact on the market, increasing their user satisfaction, reputation and recognition.”

Another trend is that, as with business intelligence, ECM tools are gradually filtering down to smaller companies. “ECM used to be a purely a large enterprise play, but now more and more vendors are creating solutions that are suitable for SMEs,” confirms Owaineh. “This will be another driver for growth. Companies will tap into this unexploited market and provide more ECM solutions for small enterprises.”

As for the future of ECM, he predicts a few developments, particularly when it comes to the crucial role small vendors and their more bespoke and specific solutions can bring. “In terms of industry solutions, it’s really hard for really large vendors who provide a platform to focus on very specific industry solutions – solutions that would serve law firms or manufacturing companies, for instance,” suggests Owaineh. “They do offer these types of products but they tend to be customised versions of their generic solutions. However, there are many small vendors who focus on a specific niche area and do it very well. The challenge for enterprises is to minimise the management cost of the ECM solution and that’s why broad platforms are really attractive. But there’s no doubt that the most interesting innovations will come from smaller companies who have focused solutions with narrow applicability. These will then be underpinned by integrated large platforms from the big vendors.”