Content management market to boom

Local users remain skeptical towards enterprise content management, despite predictions the market will reach US$9 billion in software and services by 2007, says analyst firm META Group.

The ECM market will reach US$2.3 billion in software and US$7 billion in services globally by 2007, representing a compound annual growth rate of 15 percent, analysts claimed. Meanwhile, vendors in the ECM sphere will continue to consolidate through 2005, they said.

However local ECM vendors that have expected big wins in the short terms will be disappointed.

According to the latest METAspectrumSM In Depth report, organisations are increasingly seeing ECM software as a strategic core investment for managing content and applying proper compliance.
 
Yet the Australian market is one of "neglect" and "apathy" towards managing content, according to John Brand, vice president of technology, research and services at META Group.

Brand said there is a general malaise towards content management in Australia, and it would take 18 months to 2 years for the momentum to pick up locally.

"There's been a general attitude of 'if it's in a document, we don't have to worry about it. We only have to worry about what we can fit into a database.'," he said.

"The fact is when you look at the way organisaitons run, they absorb 80 percent of costs of running their IT organisations on keeping highly structured transactional applications running. That 20 percent remainder is spread across everything else. Yet when you look at what keeps the company running from an information perspective, about 80 percent doesn't exist in those transactional systems or databases. So there is a huge mismatch between what they say is important and where the money is being spent."

Interestingly Australian businesses interest in ECM peaked ahead of the US, but has waned considerably as companies have grown apathetic towards the technology, according to Brand.

"Strangely enough the market died off. Now interest is re-emerging. But I would say there is still a fair amount of apathy in this market, when you compare the difference between organisations here and in Asia," he said.

While financial institutions and the government sector represent the bulk of the interest in ECM, there has been a "surprising" high level of interest in the manufacturing sector, Brand added.

"Here the market is too skeptical. We don't have the same type of compliance implications that the US has," he said.

Charlie Brett, senior program director with META Group's Technology Research Services and lead author of the report said: "By 2006, approximately 60 percent of Global 2000 organisations will standardise on a strategic ECM framework, though many will maintain existing investments in tactical or line-of-business (LOB) content deployments".
 
The report evaluated 14 vendors in this market, including Documentum, IBM, FileNet, and Open Text, rating the strengths and limitations of each vendor's product offerings.