Different routes through the content maze

In the last of our special reports, IT Week examines software firms’ enterprise content management offerings

Now that the importance of enterprise content management (ECM) is well established, a wide variety of vendors have stepped in with solutions. They have taken various approaches that have been subsequently reviewed as buyers’ needs and the competitive landscape have altered. None offers a universal panacea and all overlap, but understanding a little about the background of some of the better known content management firms will help companies struggling to come to terms with the content explosion.

Evolution

As discussed in earlier parts of this series, ECM is an unsatisfactory umbrella term that covers long-familiar document management practices and workflow as well as relatively young areas such as web content management (WCM), email archiving and new approaches to indexing, collaboration and other areas.

ECM firms have also taken disparate approaches to developing functionality. Many acquired rivals or partnered with them to expand capabilities while others took a contrasting approach and attempted to reduce complexity by introducing simpler products that sacrifice functionality for easier deployment.

Firms with deep roots in document management include Open Text, FileNet, EMC Documentum and IBM. These are highly scalable systems that have been extended to manage web, email and collaboration. They are typically quite costly to install but these giants can boast a wealth of experience at the world’s largest organisations. They have also experienced a renaissance in recent times as firms have turned to them for tools to comply with corporate governance rules.

Both Open Text and Documentum have been major participants in ECM consolidation over the past few years. Open Text acquired German rival Ixos and several smaller firms while Documentum acquired collaboration software developer eRooms and then was itself acquired by storage giant EMC in 2003.

The late 1990s saw several web content management specialists emerge, including Vignette, Stellent and Interwoven, that appealed to firms seeking to publish and catalogue on the web. Since then, they have added enterprise and collaborative features. Vignette acquired document management firm Tower Technology and made smaller purchases to add collaboration and portal capabilities. Interwoven splashed out on collaboration tools maker iManage, and Stellent purchased document imaging firm Optika to broaden its reach.

However, though these firms reached stratospheric stock valuations at the peak of the dot-com era, reports of deployment problems and other issues have brought them back to earth with a bump and they are now typically valued in the low hundreds of millions of dollars. Some watchers believe this means they could be vulnerable to being acquired or fading in relevance compared with the ECM veterans. Analyst firm Gartner last year predicted that half of the 22 companies it listed in its ECM Magic Quadrant study would be acquired by the end of 2006.

Appeal

Other vendors are attempting to make it easier for firms to try out content management. Microsoft has had significant success with its SharePoint portal, and Oracle will shortly enter the market with a product it will offer alone and as part of its Collaboration Suite. The product will make its public debut at Internet World in London in June.

“If users are given a framework that makes it easy for them to store documents [and it] automatically handles much of the lifecycle of information such as versioning, attribution and records management, then the process will be much easier to manage,” said Oracle Collaboration Suite’s Martin DeVille. “Oracle’s approach will enable firms to extend [content management] across the entire work- force, without costing them a large proportion of their IT budget.”

As vendors jostle for position, several see partnerships as critical. Interwoven recently entered into a pact with Microsoft that will see the firms jointly target law firms and professional services companies.

“We’re going to work on solutions that leverage SharePoint as our framework,” said Neil Araujo, Interwoven vice-president. “What IT struggles with is getting users to adopt and with this you have familiar interfaces. It’s tightly coupled with SharePoint and Outlook so you get faster return on investment.”

Mobius is trying a similar trick by integrating with SharePoint.

“Mobius sees the content repository as providing the fastest and most tangible [return on investment],” said Karry Kleeman, European senior vice-president. “Smart buyers understand this and resist the temptation to be driven into an ECM frenzy by the vendor community. There’s a lot of wait-and-see out there on the collaboration side because the value proposition is less stable. An ECM implementation should not be heavily dependent on services and customisation.”