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 :-)