ECM vendor lock in challenged....

It wasn't long ago that Documentum was the only choice for pharmaceutical, Interwoven for legal, FileNet for insurance etc. Each vendor had a stanglehold on one or two industry sectors, and over the years locked in key clients. But with the commoditization of some elements of ECM, more use of open standards, the emergence of service oriented architectures and challengers coming from the open source community, those locked in positions will increasingly come under question.

Buyers who have long used a particular vendor as the corporate standard, should look again at the changes in the market, and what they will find might suprise them. Because until recently many vendors refused to bid or only did so half heartedly in many large accounts, knowing that it was 'owned' by a rival vendor. But now that new players are coming in and rocking the boat, there is more openess to potential new suppliers, and concern with over dependence on particular vendors. What this means is that this is a good time to be a buyer - you can make your complacent installed vendor dance for their supper again, you can negotiate from a position of strength and you can spread your bets a little wider. Vive la change!

Oracle acquires Stellent - On balance a good move

Oracle finally acquires an ECM company, after initially passing on Documentum & FileNet (now owned by EMC and IBM respectively). It’s a move that appears to make sense for a number of reasons not least because:

• Oracle is very keen to make headway in the ECM market and their own attempts to date have fallen short.

• Stellent is a well respected players and gives Oracle instant kudos, expertise and visibility in the ECM sector

• At a technical level Stellent is probably the easiest (in relative terms) of the remaining ECM systems in the market to integrate into the Oracle stack

But even if at this high level Stellent appears to be a good fit for Oracle, there is no guarantee that this will be plain sailing.

• For starters even though Stellent may be a key ECM player, they are not very well represented in large enterprises

• They are considerably smaller by any measure than Filenet (IBM), Documentum (EMC) or OpenText

• The corporate culture at Stellent embodies Minnesota nice, mid Western congeniality – Oracle can be brutal

• Stellent is big enough to make integration into Oracle a challenge, but not big enough to be seen by many key execs within Oracle as strategic

On balance Stellent seems like a good move for Oracle but it is not without its challenges. I suspect the Oracle Content DB will largely remain (selling multi thousand seat low price deployments) but the Stellent product set once integrated and rationalized will provide the heavier duty components to qualify Oracle in many competitive situations, and plug specialist gaps.

Though it will not close the gap between Oracle and EMC, IBM and OpenText it does steal a march on arch rivals SAP who’s attempts at ECM related activities have been tepid at best.

For buyers and users of Stellent technologies there should be little to worry about in the short to mid term, but new buyers will need to push Oracle sales staff for clear information on forward direction.

At this rate 2007 is gearing up to be the year of ECM – for with these acquisitions digested there will be a lot of new money for marketing and R&D being pumped in by the majors. Clearly there is now growing pressure for SAP to respond, and though most of the money is on them acquiring OpenText (read iXOS), the plethora of acquired technologies that make up OpenText may present a pandora’s box that historically conservative SAP may not be willing to open.

For maturity in ECM we are almost at 1.0 with the major players owning the vast majority of the market – what they will do, and they will do many things, is still open to debate but ECM 2.0 will emerge.

For a couple of other really good persepctives on this check out:

Ralph Gammon
Tony Byrne

The last 10 years in ECM

I have been tidying up my home office in prep for an extended home working schedule, and came across two publications that took me back in time. Ovum Evaluates: Document Management (published in 1998) and the AIIM Expo 1998 Guide. The Ovum report in particular brought back many memories as I wrote the follow up to this "Ovum Evaluates: Integrated Document Management".

(ECM was for a brief while IDM, then it became KM, then back to EDM, then ECM...........)

It is quite amazing to see the changes that our industry have been through in the past 10 years, how many faces and names are long since gone, and what has remained fundamental and unchanged throughout that time.

The list of those once prominent but now gone include:

• Eastman
• Feith
• Keymage
• Lava Systems
• SiDoc
• Teamware
• NetRight
• Texcel

Others are also gone, but still around under different guises:

• Lotus (now IBM)
• PC Docs (now OpenText previously Hummingbird)
• FileNet (now IBM)
• Documentum (now EMC)
• Altris (now Spescom)
  

Interestingly the one unchanged player that I came across was EVER - a firm who only this year got themselves added to the Gartner Magic Quadrant. A testament to just how US centric we can all be at times. Indeed European firms often have great difficulty getting proper analyst and press coverage, this was certainly the case for SER and iXOS in their heyday, and remains the case for EVER and Nuxeo I think.

A brief look through the fundamental chapters of the Ovum report, and the AIIM guide to the working sessions at the Expo reveals that little in essence (other than the players names) has changed. The same problems that businesses face persist, and in the main the pretty much the same solutions are being offered.

We have moved from client server to web ubiquity, we talk about Web Services and 2.0 - but at the end of the day we still scan, capture, ingest, manage, deliver, publish and archive. In other words the code has become a little slicker as have the UI's, but at core its still document management and workflow :-)