With advances in content management technology and a shot of the Cloud and social intelligence, ECM tools have become smarter. By Pupul Dutta
Over the years, ECM has evolved from being a siloed document store to a knowledge management and collaboration system including aspects of structured and unstructured data tied together into a content delivery platform that integrates all enterprise data and content sources.
Factors driving the growth of ECM include the evolution of content generated by business users and the increasing need to integrate said content within business processes. User expectations in terms of being able to find relevant content quickly and in a usable format also weigh heavily on this category. Lastly, we have the requirement to ensure governance and control of content in order to comply with regulations and being prepared for legal discovery.
The ECM market is evolving as businesses are opting for platforms that have grown beyond simply managing content. Open source ECM is catching on with mid-market companies for the usual reasons—lower or no acquisition cost and freedom to tweak and tinker. Also being talked up by vendors are Cloud-based apps.
Cloud, mobility, analytics, big content
According to Gavin Tay, Research Director at Gartner, “The forces of change that will act on the ECM market will come from four areas namely the Cloud, mobility, analytics and big content.”
Deployments of ECM through the hosted or SaaS model will give companies the flexibility of launching new content initiatives quickly with no upfront costs for servers, system integrators and (usually) software licenses, explained Tay.
Anand Raman, Vice President – Marketing, Newgen Software Technologies Limited, felt that, “Everyone is waiting for the right time to migrate to the Cloud. Though some enterprise infrastructure services are being used by organizations, however, the complete suite of services is yet to be adopted through this model.”
“The early adopters of Cloud-based ECM are BPO outfits. They have deployed process platforms on Cloud. These process platforms are built on ECM or BPM with a multi-tenant infrastructure,” said Raman.
“There is a term called transactional content management. You are building solutions to cater to the needs of the customer. Going forward, the convergence of these two (ECM and BPM), wherein 80% is ready to use and 20% is adaptable, would become the norm,” said Tay of Gartner.
Other visible trends are mobile content delivery, social predictive analytics, semantic search and social platforms. “Organizations must be geared up to adopt these trends so that they can satisfy legal requirements and comply with regulations. They must also face up to challenges related to security, complex workflows, scanning/capturing, business processes etc.,” said Naresh Kumar Gandesiri, Asia Head – ECM and Mobility Practices, Virtusa.
Consolidation & Cross-selling
With so many vendors offering services, which were originally part of an ECM offering, customers as well as vendors are striving for consolidation. This is true for cases where different vendors are offering services like DMS, archival, imaging etc.
“Many customers are looking at consolidating their various Content Management System (CMS) platforms into one which would help them build the platform, expose services to core business functions and reduce their TCO,” said Gandesiri of Virtusa.
Raman of Newgen, disagreed. He felt that customers still prefer a single vendor for servicing all of their needs.
Sanjay Manchanda, Director – Business Division, Microsoft India, explained that it was a cyclical process wherein people looked for best-of-breed products. “About three to four products are coming from the same company. From archival to dedupe, retrieval etc, everything is offered under one umbrella by a single company. Customers too want to consolidate, doing away with multiple vendors and wasteful expenditure,” he said.
“Vendors today have begun investing in integration and virtualization capabilities in part to remain ‘connected’ to various implementations in an organization as well as to try to cross sell capabilities. However, they have also begun to focus in earnest on specific horizontal and vertical applications to be built upon their platforms or those of others so as to sustain themselves in the market,” explained Vikas Pradhan, Country Director, CommVault India.
Sunil Bhave, VP – Application Services, Fujitsu Consulting India, said, “Cross-selling is beneficial to vendors. When they are approaching a customer who doesn’t have either DMS or ECM, the customer can opt for the vendor’s services for both these solutions. Most clients today have DMS as it is quite prevalent but, in a sector where it hasn’t, a vendor who is offering both these solution-sets or services has an edge.”
Cloud-based ECM
According to a study by Gartner, market demand for Cloud-based content management solutions has been growing as organizations look to reduce operational costs and streamline their business processes. Employing software delivered from the Cloud may require changes to data retention and governance policies.
“Cloud adoption is gaining ground; however, it far from widespread. The price point has to be attractive as the systems scale and, hence, Cloud vendors will have to look at it from that perspective,” said Shivakumar Krishnamurthy, Associate Vice President and Practice Head, IT Services, Mindteck.
Since, Cloud deployments of ECM allow the flexibility for enterprises to launch new content initiatives without any upfront CAPEX on hardware or software there has been an increase in demand for Cloud-based solutions.
Gandesiri of Virtusa said, “We are seeing increased demand for Cloud-based ECM solutions where customers want to manage their non-critical WCM and DM through the Cloud. There are many solutions that are already available in the market which do this. ECM on the Cloud helps organizations focus on their core business by reducing the effort spent in managing the infrastructure, hardware or software and helps in application management, which is further passed on to the Cloud vendors.”
Open Source ECM
Open source ECM technologies that are aligned with Cloud computing are gaining traction.
“The prime attraction for any company to opt for an open source solution is the reduced or zero cost of licensing followed by features that sometimes are better than those of proprietary software solutions,” said Bhave of Fujitsu.
“About 25-30% of the requests that we receive are for open source ECM solutions,” he added.
Pradhan of Commvault felt that the investment that went into setting up infrastructure was higher than the cost of a proprietary solution. “All the well known enterprise solutions are proprietary and integrating these with Linux-based systems or solutions can be a huge challenge. Though open source has become quite popular in India, it is more efficient as an operating system rather than in the solutions space,” he added.
ECM and Social Intelligence
Products across software categories are taking a cue from services like Facebook and Twitter and incorporating elements from these social networking sites. Microsoft’s SharePoint is loaded with social features like Box that connects users to relevant people, content and conversations. Then there are services like Jive and Salesforce Chatter that help businesses share information on top of a social architecture.
In the current scenario of 24×7 connectivity, content management vendors need to leverage social recommendations and discover important business content quickly, showcase real-time activities in news feeds to provide a more holistic view of what’s happening in an organization and aggregate insights into how content is being used.
However, except for a handful of vendors, not many are offering social intelligence unless they have been asked to include the same in their offering.
“The driving forces of ECM’s future will be the fact that enterprises would want to bring more of their content under the control of an ECM tool, by gaining valuable insights from the usage patterns, latent knowledge in content as well as the social interactions that occur during the collaborative creation and dissemination of the content. In this respect, social intelligence is the best tool that they can incorporate in their offering,” said Tay of Gartner.
Collaboration is another important element of ECM and it holds the key to success. “At a holistic level, ECM helps to derive value from knowledge to enhance revenue, reduce cost, foster innovation and enhance customer satisfaction,” said Manchanda of Microsoft.
Going forward
It is expected that Cloud computing along with the convergence of ECM, BPM, BI and mobility, will be the trend. Other trends include social analytics, the integration of mobility with BI for viewing reports and also publishing the approvals/workflow on to the mobile devices for quicker decision making.
According to Gartner, by 2015, at least 60% of information workers will interact with their content applications via a mobile device. Lastly, content analytics defines a family of technologies that processes content and the behavior of users in consuming content to derive answers to specific questions. Content types include text of all kinds, such as documents, blogs, news sites, customer conversations (both audio and text), and social network discussions.
