ECM MArket Drivers 2009

Market Drivers

In general, the economic climate from 2008 to 2009 has forced businesses to make difficult choices in terms of technology spending. However, the ECM market is somewhat insulated from the recession, for three reasons:

• The sheer size of increase in the volume and complexity of content is stimulating concern and investment.
• Pricing pressure from open-source vendors or competing "stack" or suite vendors has driven the price per seat in proposals down to discount level, which has stimulated higher demand (though increases in maintenance and services costs have partly offset this reduction).
• Often no single person controls the budget for all of an organization's ECM components and solutions, so point purchases remain common. These are often for independent projects whose business sponsors have a single return on investment (ROI) target.

Attractive opportunities exist for organizations to consolidate or rationalize certain overlapping and expensive components of vast enterprise content architectures. The breadth and maturity of some ECM offerings means it may now be feasible to address fundamental ECM needs with products from fewer vendors. Regional vendors, vertical-market specialists, open-source software providers, and SaaS vendors may find openings in enterprise departments, but IT and business strategists should seek to rationalize a content architecture that protects against one-off tactical purchases which isolate information or user populations.

The need to manage the risks associated with growing stores of unmanaged paper and digital content requires a focus on content valuation and governance. Vendors in various software and service markets are underscoring the threats from uncontrolled content by addressing different messages to different stakeholders in order to stimulate tactical spending on products for image capture, archiving, e-mail archiving, records management, policy management, storage (hardware and software), content repository federation, enterprise search, e-discovery, e-forms, and regulatory compliance. Recognition of this has encouraged enterprises to review their strategies for managing content life cycle, access control, availability and costs in more meaningful ways.