Looking at the Legacy Content Management Vendors

In my predictions for 2013, I made the following prediction on the future of the traditional “leaders” in the Content Management space.

First Major On-Premises Traditional ECM Vendor will become Obsolete: I know, obvious right? Statistically speaking, one of those vendors will likely still be a market leader in 10 years. In 2013, we’ll see our next elimination for that spot (though they will be in denial). To make this easier to measure, I’ll name the contenders: EMC, IBM, Open Text, and Oracle. Microsoft falls into this category but it won’t be them, at least not in 2013.

Aside from simple statistical probability, I saw a few things this fall that led to this prediction.

  1. Talked to people attending the IBM Information OnDemand while I was in Las Vegas.
  2. Attended the Open Text conference in Orlando.
  3. Watched the news out of Momentum Europe.
  4. Kept my eyes open.

What I’ve seen is a scary amount of consistency among the players.

Continue reading

EMC and Web Content Management

I made a few observations the other week about the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management that came out recently.  I, and others, criticized what it was measuring (though one blogger defended the MQ). I made the following comment in my dissection:

Personally, I think EMC (Documentum) and IBM (FileNet) are Niche Players in the WCM world at best.  Why?  Their WCM products sell into a very specific niche, those companies that already have, or are making, investments in their EMC or IBM platforms. If you know of either product winning a pure WCM bid, let me know.

Well, no comments on them winning a bid.  Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, just means that people that know of such wins didn’t read the post or care to comment. My point still is that EMC’s, and IBM’s, WCM offering is not the “Challenger” as the MQ seems to suggest.

Let’s dig in a little.

Continue reading

Co-Existence of SharePoint and ECM

A few weeks ago, I attended the AIIM seminar SharePoint meets ECM. When I registered, I received Doculabs’ White Paper, The Co-existence of Microsoft SharePoint and Advanced ECM Platforms: What You Need to Know. I hinted in my post about the event that I would write another post specifically addressed to this White Paper and I have finally gotten around to it.

Before I dive into the nitty-gritty details, I wanted to share an interesting observation. I started this blog to talk about things that were of interest to the EMC/Documentum crowd. That has expanded to encompass broader ECM issues such as standards. I think these topics are of interest to Documentum Architects, so it isn’t a reach. However, I’ve noticed a trend. Whenever I post on SharePoint, my hits jump way up. If I was just after hits, I’d just switch to SharePoint all the time. However, I expect this to be one of my last posts on the topic for a while as I have bigger fish to fry and I think I’ll have covered most of what I feel I need to cover for the short term.

It does make one think. I wonder how far my hit rate would jump if I included the name of a celebrity who is named after a French city? I’m not shameless enough to find out. Now on to the meat of the post…

Continue reading

The ECM Magic Quadrant

[Updated 11/10/2008 in order to make Gartner, Inc. happier, or at least less angry.]

[Edit: See the newer The Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management, 2008 write-up.]

The latest version [This is the now old 2007 version] came out a couple weeks ago. There has been, and will continue to be, some criticism of the Gartner, Inc. methodology. For now, let’s set it aside and look focus on what the report says. While it may not cover all the vendors, and may not define “leader” in the same manner as others, the information inside can still prove useful.

Continue reading