Enterprise Content Management for SMBs

Enterprise Content Management for SMBs

Most vendors have given SMBs pretty short shrift. That's got to change--content management is a good place to start.

Long thought of as the second-class citizens of IT, small-tomedium- businesses (SMBs) drew the focus of major and mid-range IT vendors alike in the late 1990s for a number of reasons. First, the era of big, enterprise installed applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) seemed about over. SAP and other vendors had saturated the high end of the customer base and needed to go downmarket. Second, the SMB market was supposed to dramatically outgrow the Global 2000 market in the next 10 years. Third, in order for those new SMBs to compete with G2000s, they would need to adopt technologies that would level the playing field with G2000s—specifically, Internet and Web content management technologies that allow the creation of virtual storefronts with customer service.

Major players like Microsoft launched new divisions supposedly devoted to serving SMBs. Others like IBM with its Express line, debuted mid-range versions of older enterprise products for SMBs. Still others acquired mid-range offerings EMC/Documentum from its OTG acquisition. Application service providers (ASP) sprung up all over the place purportedly to provide SMBs with enterprise applications online. Even small vendors chanted the “small is beautiful” mantra. Well, it all sounded good, but most SMBs found that these players paid them little more than lip service. If, in fact, their booming numbers did compensate in volume of smaller individual sales for the thinner margins they required, then IT vendors had their bases covered. But they weren’t going to promote and seed a market that might never materialize.

The fact is, says Tom Eid, principal analyst, Content, Communication and Collaboration, Gartner, “vendors pay more attention to larger companies in terms of marketing, providing advanced releases, and other benefits.” That’s because “SMBs do not buy technology—instead, they tend to buy solutions that solve their business problems,” says Sanjeev Aggarwal, senior analyst, Small and Medium Business Strategies, Yankee Group. In other words, SMBs don’t madly pursue the state-of-the-art because the generally lack the funds and/or IT resources. They buy solutions that do things like help them be more profitable, cut costs, and be more efficient.