Main trends of ECM

In the world market of ECM in 2012-2013 serious "wind of change" blows that is noted by one and all serious researchers. The user requirements ECM seriously changed in the last two years so vendors had to modify the road maps according to business needs.

Old approaches became outdated

One of the last researches AIIM and Alfresco, for example, came out in 2013 under the name "ECM at a Crossroads" ("ECM at the crossroads")^[1]. It showed that only 3% of the polled companies already completely closed the old file hosting services though 12% "practically replaced" them with ECM. 34% of the companies are going to refuse inside corporate file hosting services, but for 61% of respondents it still play an essential role.

Estimate quality of information management in your company?

AIIM, 2013
Quality evaluations of information management of different type are read as follows: the red zone - chaotic management, a pink zone - is some defects, a blue zone - management takes place, a blue zone - management is organized properly

During the research it was also established that only about a third (26%) of classical ECM of implementations use capture and image processing from documents. At 61% of the organizations as it became clear, content, key for business, is concentrated in the systems of other types – ERP, HR, financial and others.

Only 11% of respondents noted that they have the optimized mobile browser for work with ECM, only 10% are customized mobile applications. 25% dropped a hint of doubt of different sense concerning use of ECM in cloud environments.

What your plans concerning implementation of ECM?

AIIM, 2013
Answers from top to down: I have no ECM system and plans for implementation; I plan implementation in the next year; I have a system at the level of departments; I have the solution covering several departments; we are engaged in implementation of a corporate system; completed implementation of corporate ECM; we are going to replace ECM.

At the same time, in the next 12 months expenses on ECM should will increase. How it is connected among themselves? The matter is that the systems or systems preceding them existing at the ECM enterprises need serious review and updating. Outdated instruments of work with corporate files do not meet requirements of modern business any more. As a result, and ECM systems from the file storages working only "for an input" gradually acquire interaction interfaces between a system and users and users with each other.

New solutions will destroy the old market

So in the world market of ECM the most important – methodology of use of such platforms so platforms from the technical point of view are actively transformed changes. During this reorganization of technologies focus will be shifted for benefit of the tools which more actively are built in business processes of the companies bringing real dividends. For example, according to data of Forrester Research for 2013, according to the results of poll of ECM of specialists of 44% from them could not correlate the implemented products of this class to any really expressed ROI at all.

The growing number of instruments of content interaction destroys the traditional approaches established in the companies for management of corporate information. Services of data storage like Box step on heels of ECM to vendors more and more seriously. Though functionally online storages seriously lose ECM, but in work for end users they are much simpler. Especially it is relevant for Microsoft SharePoint. Analysts do not expect that such services will win a serious share of the world market of ECM, however, predicting the conclusion of various partnership between services and vendors of platforms of corporate content management.

The mobility and usability solve everything

Accustoming of users, including corporate, to universal use of mobile technologies led to the fact that they expect from business applications also availability on the run (on the go) as something self-evident. On the other hand, corporate users already have permanent experiment on interaction with rather conveniently designed information technologies for mass users, for example, mobile operating systems and social networks, web browsers so their requirements to flexibility and simplicity of work including with ECM grow.

Promotes innovations as well development of open standards and technologies: Alfresco Software was a pioneer of open source ECM, and today many vendors use open technologies for optimization of the solutions, for example, of Apache. The standard of interaction of services of content management (content management interoperability services standard - CMIS) is used by such vendors as Alfresco Software, EMC, IBM, Microsoft, Newgen Software Technologies, Open Text and Xerox.

The attention to clouds grows

Since 2011 most large ECM of vendors took serious steps in the direction of development of cloud solutions for management of corporate information, both hosting services, and separate cloud solutions and also public cloud services belong here. For example, provided as in the research Forrester Wave The Forrester Wave^[2], and a magic square of Gartner for 2013 the M-Files company offers a hybrid cloud service, Hyland implemented already about 700 cloud projects.

EMC, HP and Open Text mega-vendors in this market segment use mechanisms of merges and absorption for faster promotion. Significantly progressed in this plan and Microsoft with SharePoint Online exit. Actively the offer as well Alfresco develops SaaS.

In general, according to Forrester, the market of ECM is still far from a cloud boom: so far (for 2013) only 12% of the managers making decisions on purchase of similar products note plans for implementation of cloud ECM.

The charge of innovations is born in themselves also by niche players. For example, strength of solutions of the German company Saperion are kontento-centric technologies, management of documents, archives, the electronic signature, email. Here it is worth mentioning the solutions DataServ, SpringCM, Veeva Systems and others.

See Also

• EDMS (more detailed)
• ECM – Enterprise Content Management
• EDMS (Software technologies)
• EDMS (implementation technique)
• ECM (world market)
• EDMS (market of Russia)
• EDMS in Russia: industry specifics
• Trends of the Russian market of ECM
• EDMS/ECM projects geography
• EDMS in the SaaS format
• EDI - Electronic Data Interchange

Notes