Regulatory compliance requirements are driving demand
for IT systems that can secure, store and manage documents and data
in a structured way. So what are suppliers doing to meet this
need?
The pharmaceutical, legal and healthcare industries have used
document management systems for some time to store and organise
their data securely and meet their legal obligations. And now few
organisations are immune from compliance pressures from laws such
as the Data Protection Act and the forthcoming Freedom of
Information Act.
To address this, suppliers such as Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and Adobe
have merged their systems with content management and other
applications. This new breed of software has been dubbed enterprise
content management.
Connie Moore, director at Forrester Research, said document
management companies have metamorphosed into enter-prise content
management suppliers.
"After three years of consolidation in document management, web
content management, document imaging, records management, digital
asset management, and collaboration, enterprise content management
is now a major software category, paralleling the way ERP and CRM
developed from point solutions into broad suites," she said.
"Now IT suppliers want a piece of the action, consolidation will
pick up speed in 2005."
Moore said document management giant Documentum started the trend
by developing web content management systems and acquiring
suppliers of collaboration, digital asset management, and records
management, before itself being bought by storage supplier
EMC.
Another leading content supplier, Interwoven, formerly focused
solely on web content management, but it made multiple acquisitions
including collaborative document management, digital asset
management and records management providers.
Vignette, which previously sold web content management, had a
similar transformation, according to Moore. She said Vignette
expanded its product family to offer a portal, collaboration,
document imaging, document management and records management.
"And Open Text continued its buying binge by acquiring business
process management, message archiving, document imaging, document
management, web content management and digital asset management
suppliers."
Gartner principal analyst Tom Eid said many content and document
management suppliers provide vertical, industry-specific and
line-of-business-focused products. The financial services,
government, healthcare, insurance, legal, manufacturing and
pharmaceutical industries are among those catered for.
Line-of-business products include suites designed for sales,
marketing, customer service, finance, accounting and compliance,
program management and IT management, added Eid.
"In 2003 the content and document management market grew by 9.2% to
more than £558m in new licence sales worldwide. This is in marked
contrast to 2002, which saw a decline of more than 12%," said
Eid.
There are a number of factors behind the consolidation of
enterprise content management technologies and the rise in demand
for them.
One is IT consolidation, as most organisations have shifted from a
decentralised IT infrastructure with multiple niche application
servers to a more centralised model, in an attempt to drive down
costs.
The economic downturn drove this move, said Moore. "Centralised IT
organisations know that an enterprise content management suite from
a single supplier can reduce costs by obtaining deeper discounts
from suppliers for larger deals," she said.
"Costs can also be driven down by consolidating IT support,
development and training, reducing the overheads inherent in
dealing with multiple suppliers and streamlining infrastructures
through server consolidation."
Another of the drivers behind the adoption of enterprise content
management is knowledge management - the need to manage information
held in the thousands of electronic documents generated by an
organisation. These might be Microsoft Office documents, letters,
notes or presentations, e-mails, or operational documents such as
purchase orders or invoices.
Effective management of documents and records across the whole
lifecycle, from capture to archiving and destruction, has become
essential.
Document security is another concern. Many documents are inherently
insecure, with insufficient access controls. Such documents can be
transported out of the organisation by staff using web-based
e-mail, instant messaging or portable devices such as USB
drives.
Enterprise content management systems can lock down the documents.
Adobe, for instance, is building stronger security into individual
documents. Version 7 of Acrobat Reader, launched this week, can be
combined with Adobe Policy Server to protect and secure documents
that contain sensitive information, and prevent unauthorised people
from opening a document.
The Adobe systems works by locking documents via the internet, and
can also prevent screen grabbing, printing, and editing. This can
stop documents being leaked to the press or competitors, said Mark
Wheeler, senior enterprise marketing manager at Adobe.
David Yockelson, senior vice-president and director at analyst firm
Meta Group, said, "As compliance and regulation concerns pervade
organisations, the time is right for large-scale deployments of
document management systems that are easy to use, administer and
buy.
"As the major platform providers polish their enterprise document
management offerings, organisations should consider taking
advantage of these to get a better grip on content and information
assets, for compliance as well as knowledge management."
Adobe launches Acrobat 7 >>
E-mail may be used in evidence >>
What the major enterprise suppliers are
offering
SAP
SAP is building enterprise content management capabilities into
products such as Enterprise Portal, part of Netweaver. In the past,
it has partnered with EMC/Documentum, Filenet, IBM and Open Text to
add content and document management to its ERP applications.
SAP has also included its own document management capabilities
in its ERP modules for some time.
Microsoft
David Yockelson, senior vice-president and director at Meta
Group, said, "Microsoft has been seeding the market with its
combination of Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS) and Sharepoint
Portal Server (SPS), products that generally cost much less to
licence than those from traditional providers.
"However, WSS and SPS are typically targeted for 'team sites',
and are not usually deployed enterprise-wide." This means they are
not used to support a complete document lifecycle for thousands of
concurrent users and transactions on a distributed basis, he
said.
IBM and Documentum
IBM and Documentum offer low-end and mid-range document
management tools. Both have employee collaboration tools to compete
with Microsoft Sharepoint. IBM Lotus Team Workplace (formerly
Quickplace), and Documentum Eroom incorporate basic document
management capabilities.
Plumtree
Portal suppliers such as Plumtree offer document and web content
management capabilities as separately licensed add-ons, said Connie
Moore, director at Forrester Research. "As this occurs, mainstream
IT suppliers are seeing first-hand the importance of integrating
content into core business processes," she said.
Oracle
In 2005, Oracle plans to introduce document management
capabilities into Oracle Collaboration Suite, building on its Files
capabilities. Meta Group's David Yockelson said, "I believe Oracle
will lead the [new document management] charge, although IBM and
SAP are potential competitors."
The integration alternative
Forrester Research pointed out that many companies have already
installed document management, document imaging and web content
management technologies.
Replacing these with a single suite could be impractical,
expensive and disruptive to the business. An alternative would be
to use a layer of software to link together existing and new
enterprise content systems.
Forrester said enterprise content integration could provide the
glue for multi-supplier environments, sitting between applications
and content repositories to integrate heterogeneous
environments.
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