Enterprise Content Management Marketplace: Opportunities and Risks -- CMS Watch

Enterprise Content Management Marketplace: Opportunities and Risks -- CMS Watch

Enterprise Content Management Marketplace: Opportunities and Risks
by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
23-Apr-2007

Enteprise Content Management (ECM) technologies can have a huge impact on your business. So naturally, buyers will do well to carefully assess both ECM products and the vendors that sell them.

It is all too easy to select vendors for your short list based on their supposed “leadership” status in the market – status given either by analyst firms or by the vendors themselves. As our ECM Suites Report amply describes, ECM represents a very wide range of technologies to solve an equally wide range of business problems. Your challenge becomes making the right “fit” for your specific needs.

Once you have identified toolsets that meet your requirements, you also need to consider the vendors. Again “leadership” status in a top right quadrant on an analyst chart does little more than tell you who has the biggest revenues in the sector, along with the widest array of technology to offer. It does not tell you whether the vendor’s corporate status is in state of flux, or whether the product set is currently undergoing an overhaul, or whether both are in the process of becoming somewhat irrelevant in the marketplace due to a lack of innovation and investment.

Major ECM vendors will gladly dazzle, and wine and dine your team, but though they may appear to be a safe and conservative choice, in fact today many are ironically higher-risk partners.

All of these factors involve risk to you, the buyer. So we'd like to provide you with some key indicators to recognize and weigh those risks. Interestingly, you'll see that major brands that would appear a safe and conservative choice actually, in some circumstances, represent higher-risk choices.

To gain maximum value from this analysis you need to consider two key factors: Your enterprise and the ECM marketplace. Each buying organization is different. What represents a high risk to one may represent a chance for innovation and a competitive advantage to another. What represents a staid, uninspiring, and somewhat slow-moving product set to one enterprise may represent a solid area of comfort and low risk to another. And of course, vendors and products are in constant flux.

Charting Risks
The chart below represents four key dimensions that we believe should supplement a functional, cost/value analysis in any major procurement decision. Use this tool in addition to the specific product research that looks in more detail at the detailed functional and technical capabilities of the technology sets.



There is no “right” or “magic” or “leader” location this chart. Buyers with strong internal IT processes and a predilection for “early adoption” may favor a vendor undertaking fundamental change, on the grounds that they can influence roadmaps and new technology and “leapfrog” competitors stuck with older tools and approaches. Other customers will prefer an ECM supplier evolving at a more moderate pace; while still other buyers will prefer a more conservative approach. It is for you to decide where your preferences sit.

The four dimensions we plot are:

1. Size – Denotes the relative size and importance of the vendor in the broad technology marketplace.
2. Focus on ECM – Indicates how much of the firm’s efforts are focused on ECM. For some it is a side activity, for others it is the sole focus.
3. Vendor Evolution – Weighs the current pace of change at the vendor itself: Is it evolving as the marketplace changes? Has it just been acquired, or acquired another product?
4. Product Development – Weighs the current pace of change for the ECM solution. Is the product line about to undergo a major revision? Is the firm in the midst of trying to piece together many disparate modules. Or is little happening, with a mature product undergoing minimal change?

Each buyer will rate the importance of these dimensions differently and we encourage you to make use of this tool interactively. Our placement of the vendors denotes our assessments as of mid-2007; we will update it substantially every six months. To be sure, the vendor are in motion but here is our quick snapshot.

The Vendors
EMC|Documentum
EMC|Documentum is going through a period of major change in 2007: not only is D6 (a major upgrade to the product) due in September, 2007, but the firm lost recently lost its charismatic leader Dave DeWalt – a loss seemingly unexpected by EMC, and one that will have a major impact on the executive leadership, and by default corporate and product direction of the Documentum product set. Hence our placement of EMC Documentum firmly in the Refresh sector toward the Turbulence sector of the chart.

IBM / FileNet
When IBM bought FileNet in late 2006, they took on a product set in P8 that had recently undergone a major revision to Version 4. There is integration work to be done to make sense of the two parallel product sets (IBM CM and FileNet P8) but there is less turmoil than may have been expected. Likewise, as the entire executive team from FileNet replaced the previous IBM team, there will be a period of settling down, and certainly there will be change over time to manage; hence our placement of IBM across the Turbulence and Shifting sectors.

Oracle / Stellent
Oracle will apparently allow the Stellent UCM product set to continue in its current guise for some time to come, and instead is concentrating on integrating elements to run on top of its Content DB and BPEL process manager, so there is less turmoil here than we might have thought. Nevertheless this is a period of major change for Stellent, albeit one we expect to settle down sooner rather than later, in large part due to Oracle’s enormous resources and the relatively small size of this acquisition for Oracle. Hence placement across the Turbulence and Refresh sectors.

OpenText / Hummingbird
Corporately Open Text has a clear, applications-oriented strategy, yet there can be no underestimating the scale of the task they face in rationalizing not just the Hummingbird acquisition, but a myriad of prior purchases. Hence our placement in Shifting albeit bordering Restructuring.

Alfresco
The new kid on the block in the ECM world, Alfresco has made a mark quickly on the market, and yet despite being a new firm, they are surprisingly stable and well-funded. They are not undergoing any major corporate change, and the product is reaching a point of some maturity (as an ECM platform), but the company is still experimenting with licensing and governance models; hence our placement in Shifting, bordering Balance.

Interwoven
The WorkSite products have clearly done well for Interwoven, yet it remains unclear whether the company will commit to them to the same depth as its traditional WCM tools. Interwoven operates as a group of fiefdoms, this particular group is in comparison to others moving slowly both at the product and corporate level, hence we have placed them in Stasis, bordering on Maintenance. They are potentially a good match for a conservative buyer.

Vignette
Like Interwoven, Vignette’s original WCM products seem to get more attention than the company’s acquired ECM tools. As such little of import is happening with the product set. Some elements from the Tower acquisition appear to be languishing, and corporately addressing this does not appear to be high on their agenda. Hence our placement of Vignette in the Maintenance sector bordering Stasis.

Xerox
Xerox is a very large firm, but DocuShare is a tiny part of this mammoth company – albeit a small part that has done well. The product is mature, and we expect changes to be organic and incremental. The executive team responsible for DocuShare also remains stable, though the larger Xerox company continues to show little real interest in DocuShare – hence our placement and weighting of Xerox in Continuity.

Microsoft
Despite all the hype around SharePoint, ECM is not a major area of focus for Microsoft as a whole, even if it is getting more attention now than in the past. But the deeper story here is that SharePoint remains nowhere near complete or mature, even if it is progressing well. As such, we expect it to undergo some major revisions over the next year or so. Hence we have positioned Microsoft in Overhaul.

Hyland
Hyland is a stable company with a stable product set, developing its technology continuously, if conservatively. Hence our placement of them in the Balance sector.

[Editors note: this article was excerpted from the recently released ECM Suites Report, which contains detailed evaluations of each of these vendors.]