What is Enterprise Content Management?

Enterprise Content Management image
Enterprise Content Management or ECM as its also known is a term that evolved late 90's and early 00's to describe vendors that ammassed the ability to offer not just one type of content management but (usually through the acquisition of other CMS vendors) also able to provide multiple types of solution to manage different types of content. Gartner was one of the first analysts to attempt to put some 'rules' around when a vendor can be considered to be worthy to be called 'Enterprise' and its this definition that serves well to understand what ECM means. Almost all the ECMS vendors are charaterised by strong performance at enterprise level in their ability to provide Digital Document Management - and when you look at the revenues that DMS produces in the CMS industry as a whole compared to other CMS verticals such as WCMS its probably easy to see why its considered so important to the ranking of an ECMS vendor.
Gartner defines a content management software vendor to be 'Enterprise' when "......they have strong channel partners, a presence in multiple geographies, consistent financial performance, broad platform support, good customer support, and dominate in one or more [content mangement] technologies or vertical markets. They have the ability to deliver a comprehensive ECM suite by owning all six core components and have proven enterprise scalability."

The core ECM components that Gartner reviewed and considered relevant for inclusion as an ECM vendor were:

  • Document management - check-in/checkout control, version control, security and library services for business documents
  • Web Content Management - ability to remove the webmaster bottleneck, managing dynamic content and content authoring, general ease of use
  • Records management - ability to comply with legal or regulatory purposes, long-term archiving and automation of retention and compliance policies such as admissibility
  • Document capture and document imaging for capturing and managing paper documents - entire scanning process from paper to electronic format
  • Document-centric collaboration for document sharing and supporting project teams - including permissions
  • Workflow for supporting business processes and routing content, assigning work tasks and states, and creating audit trails of who did what, why, when and how

Maybe not surprisingly, the heavy emphasis placed by Gartner year on year on being able to show strong capabilities in document management and related technologies (such as collaboration, workflow and records management) resulted in the DMS based solutions such as EMC (Documentum), IBM (Filenet), Autonomy (Interwoven (having purchased iManage), OpenText (with its own solution and Hummingbird DM), Oracle (Stellent) dominating the upper quadrant.

The problem with the 'Enterprise' definition - and the series of barriers it creates to companies who dont match the qualification criterion - is a lot of medium sized CMS vendors dont like it, as its excludes them. So you will find phrases like 'Enterprise Digital Asset Management System' or 'Enterprise Web Content Management System' being used to try to make sure the buzzword 'Enterprise' is included in their marketing material. Strictly speaking you would need to insert the word 'level' between 'Enterprise' and the type of content being managed to accurately reflect the solutions ability to serve larger environments - but they do raise a valid objection to the classification

Its easy to undestand 'why' Gartner created the cut off given the thousands of solutions there are out there - but by the same token its easy to understand why vendors - who dont qualify for the Gartner definition because they have e.g. only one product, or are only present in one or two geograhpical locations - take it upon themselves to apply the word 'Enterprise' to their products.

Realistically, if you are going to the market with the notion you simply need an 'enterprise solution' - you could simply end up paying enterprise prices for something you are not going to exploit.

If in fact you are actually looking for an enterprise LEVEL product in ONE of the core content management components then your choice is probably better served by focusing on the CMS type you are after and choosing a solution that leads in this environment.

Its worth highlighting that many of the ECM vendors are now made up of a melting pot of other companies. A number of analysts have highlighted on the difficulties this presents to the ECM suppliers - ranging from cultural to technical to geographical market penetration. Just because an ECM vendor has an ECM suite does not mean they are by any means fully integrated.

Buyers also need to be aware that some products have been purchased to knock out competitors or secure the support and maintenance annual revenues with little or no intention of developing the solution (though they will happily continue to keep selling it to unsuspecting customers). Many purchased products are effectively in 'end of life' status. It would be prudent to check the twitter space and see what is being said about the acquired companies within an ECM vendor and their current customer perception of the future of their product.

The 7 years of the ECM Quadrant

The last 7 years ECM magic quadrants have been a tough ride for many of the listed companies. As Gartner predicted, the bigger players like IBM, Oracle and Microsoft allowed smaller companies to grow to the point that they became worth acquiring. Names like Interwoven, Vignette, Filenet and Stellent that dominated the early years became swallowed by larger brands. Looking at the quadrant in 2011 (and with the latest takover of Autonomy by HP) you could be forgiven for thinking that there are not many competitors for such a large multi billion dollar industry sector - but to do so would be to ignore the many names that have been consumed or died - and in some cases a combination of the two.

The immediate future of ECMS

The dominance of the largest ECMS vendors is likely in combination with a downturn in the economy to force a re-shuffle of the CMS industry.

The cherry picking by the big players of the medium players has effectively 'knocked out' the mid market competitors - but in doing so left a vacuum that will allow smaller players to grow and expand in an area that the larger players can potentially no longer compete - and with the downturn, the larger ECMS vendors may have lost their exhaustive ability to purchase any more solutions - and to a degree it makes no sense given it would represent a replication of what they already have - but that does not mean it wont happen - especially if revenue from existing support and maintenance contracts can be purchased at a knock down price.

More likely is that it will result in a second wave of evolving (E)CMS vendors moving into the lower left hand quadrant as a realistic alternative to the big upper quadrant players. In addition in a world where recessionary forces erode an organisations ability to invest the sort of figures that the Enterprise CMS players typically require for their software - the smaller evolving (E)CMS vendor has a very significant role to play and is likely to attract the attention of would be (E)CMS purchasers in a way that would have been less likely in 'fatter times'. CMS Customer prospects are likely to be willing to accept less than the 'best' to match the budgets they have available.

The trick for the larger players is to respond to the market and ensure the smaller budding (E)CMS solutions fail to gain significant traction in their market place.