International ECM

The thick of finishing The ECM Report is probably not the best time to muse over its findings, best to really wait till its out there in peoples hands and in use, but what the heck - here's a thought for now...

One of the (many) things that has really surprised and excited me in doing this work over the past months has been the vibrancy and strength of regional ECM vendors. We are almost brainwashed by journalist and analyst blanket coverage of major US vendors such as EMC Documentum and IBM Filenet, that it can come as a rude awakening to find out that they have serious competition outside of their home market.

And I am not just talking about the Australian vendors Tower and Objective (as Australia is English speaking they tend to get 'token' international status coverage), I am also interested in the vibrancy of the French market (see EVER and Nuxeo), Saperion in Germany, NewGen in India etc

Not to say that these are the best of the local options - there are so many to chose from.....and though I think we have done a good job over covering ECM from a truly international perspective in the report, it's something we certainly want to work on further in future!

There's a big world out there :-)

The ECM Report is official !

Today at CMS Watch Tony B announced the following:-

Announcing a new report

08-Mar-2007

In a little more than a month (April 16th, to be exact), we will publish our ECM technology evaluation research, which has been directed by CMS Watch principal, Alan Pelz-Sharpe. The ECM Suites Report will closely examine 10 major suite vendors (Alfresco, EMC|Documentum, Hyland, IBM/FileNet, Interwoven, Microsoft, Open Text/Hummingbird, Oracle/Stellent, Vignette, and Xerox), plus include shorter profiles of 20 other offering (e.g., CA/MDY, Docubase, Nuxeo, Saperion, TOWER, Xythos, and more). You can pre-order the report at a 10% discount. The results of our customer-driven research almost always surprise me, and this case is no different. As usual we'll make a free sample chapter available. Can't wait to share our findings...

Submitted by Tony Byrne, Analyst

Its been a long time coming and I think it will have been worth the wait - at least I hope so! We have gone into depth on the major players of course, but have also taken a look at regional and open source options, and of course Microsoft. Its a critical report, scathing at times - but written just for buyers and users.

Its the reason this blog has been fairly quiet of late :-)

There is a pretty good discount for pre-orders available - and I will speaking about the findings at AIIM in April, in fact I will be running a half day workshop on how to buy ECM systems...

At the end of this exercise (if there is an end) our hope is that buyers in a confused market will be better informed enabling them to make smarter decisions.


http://www.cmswatch.com/ECM/

Canada - Outsourcing - Missed Opportunity?

I spent last weekend in Canada visiting with family, and on the drive back got to thinking again about the tragic lost opportunity that is Canada as an Outsourcing destination.
Of course people do outsource to Canada, and the Waterloo/Kitchener triangle, along with some more remote regions such as New Brunswick and Nova Scotia have done ok in the past in attracting work. But overall, and particularly in terms of scale, I can't help but believe that Canada has missed out big time on an economy changing opportunity.
Consider the selling points :-

-Geographically its one huge North of the US location
-It covers 4 USA Time Zones
-Canadian have similar accents to midwesterners (sorry but it's true)
-Canadians are highly aware of US cultural norms and activities
-Skilled labor is typically cheaper in Canada than the US
-The Canadian Gov is typically generous with tax breaks and incentives
-Educational standards are high

Need I go on? With so much in its favour why then does proportionatly so little outsourcing business go there? Well I think one of the key reasons is that Canada is trying to do it alone. That they honestly believe (or believed) that they could compete on a global scale and win (look again at the many selling points). But the truth is they lost the battle long ago to India, and in the long term will lose again to China - there are some battles not worth fighting, and there are others that are long over.

Personally I think all the advantages of Canada remain, but that now is the time to partner up....

For what Canada has India does not. In fact the only general areas India (and China for that matter) is have an advantage over are cost and scale. I know from my time at Wipro that some nascent steps are being made to build bridges with Indian outsourcing giants, but surely its time for more?

I think the politicians in Canada still don't fully grasp outsourcing, and that they need to drop the idea that this is in some way eating scraps from rich peoples tables. It is not, it is called the new World Economy - and Canada could still become a strategic winner from this. But it will take serious committment, investment, resources and a sense of urgency to make it happen. Canada can't afford to miss the boat twice.

ECM the next ERP?

I am convinced that in market terms ECM is the next ERP - look at it this way, when ERP came along it just seemed like a collection of mainframe processes layered by workflow. And it was, I used to say that SAP was the worlds largest workflow vendor....

But what ERP recognized was that data centric processes were repeatable, that they were often inefficient and that many manual processes could be streamlined and automated. ERP and BPR went hand in hand.

ECM and the emergence of CEVA's (content enabled vertical applications) are really no different. In its early days, ECM was really just repository management, then structured content management, then it was repository management with a bit of compliance thrown in, and now increasingly it is process centric. It was the process centricity of ERP that lifted it, and it will be the process centricity (if such a word exists) of ECM that does the same for it.

Where the difference will come is in scale, ECM will on the one hand ultimately dwarf ERP - simply in terms of data volumes (unstructured data volumes are rising at an order of magnitude higher than structured data volumes), but it will be less visible to the user - as in many respects ECM will simply take ERP and Business Apps in general to the next generation of sophistication, rather than displace them.

My research and writing for the forthcoming ECM Report makes me believe this more so by the day, for I have the priviledge of studying the players, products and the industry full time. And what I can say for sure is that peaking under the covers at IBM, Oracle and Microsoft for an old timer like me, shows me an ECM world I have not seen before. The sheer scale of the operations, the resources and the perspectives differ radically from the industry just so recently dominated by smaller and mid tier software vendors.

Who will be the winners and losers I don't know - I like many others still speculate on SAP's ultimate moves in this area. Will it be a swift and dramatic acquistion of technologies, will they try to do it themselves, or will they remain on the sidelines and miscalculate?

What is for sure is that nothing is sure, remember DEC and NetScape? Things change and the unleashing of rich unstructured content into the business will be a turning point for many...

Playing fair with software vendors

An RFI is issued then a competitive RFP process - 3 or more vendors invest time and money to work their way though long processes and presentations.

But in fact the buyer was only getting the vendors to jump through these expensive hoops, to keep the procurement or legal team happy. The buyer had already decided at the get go who they were buying from. It's so common that it's now expected - so increasingly many vendors refuse to go along for the charade and won't bid as they know full well they have no hope of winning, regardless of how good their solution. It's a rotten situation - unethical and damaging to the industry as a whole.

Smarter buyers recognize the value of standardization, but keep the incumbent on their feet by regularly awarding contracts to competing vendors. They also don't issue long check lists of pointless RFP questions, instead they ask vendors how they would solve their particular problems, and make full use of bake off sessions, where finalists come into demo on a pre-identified area. Result? More innovation, more chance of choosing the best fit, and healthier more ethical business relationships all round.

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!