After my post earlier this week on whether or not “ECM” will continue as a useful and valid market category, it was interesting to attend an analyst day held yesterday by Open Text here in Boston. Open Text is a poster child for ECM with nearly all of its business coming from content-related products — document management, records management, archiving, WCM, capture/delivery & collab.
As the largest independent in ECM, it’s certainly in Open Text’s best interest to pursue and preserve ECM as a market category and it is doing so. “ECM” is featured prominently in the company’s basic About text, it tags itself “The Content Experts” and last year renamed its long-standing user conference from LiveLinkUp (a reference to its flagship Livelink product) to ContentWorld. Execs also claimed at the event that they see more customers coming around to the idea of enterprise content management — not in a way that is driven by a single repository or even suite, but as a set of practices and processes that must be in place for compliance and to mitigate risk and cost.
I think what remains to be seen is whether these compliance and risk-related content management practices eventually fall under an ECM bucket from a market perspective. Certainly not all vendors that sell pieces of technology in support of these practices (like archiving or records management) sell themselves as ECM, since ECM carries with it the connotation of transactional document management apps.
As a clear-cut ECM vendor, Open Text wants to compete in a clear-cut ECM market, even if competition is becoming broader and more varied. Is it big enough to define the category if other, larger vendors meld archiving, records management, eDiscovery and so forth into ‘information governance’ or some other, governance-related, non-transactional sector? Other independents like Interwoven and Hyland Software are a good deal smaller than Open Text and don’t talk as much about ECM as they used to. They’re choosing instead in most case to focus on their areas of strength (e.g., WCM or document management) and staying out of the line of fire of larger ECM competitors like IBM, EMC, Oracle and Microsoft. And I think these larger vendors are somewhat conflicted as to whether or not they want to hang an ECM banner on a broader collection of products.
One other note about Open Text’s analyst day. In contrast to events like this one held by other vendors, where, as we’ve noted before, it’s often difficult to miss the executive turnover from the prior year’s event, Open Text is refreshingly consistent. It’s the same folks year after year, the titles shift around sometimes but the exec team appears to see little change. One exception to that this year was the appearance of Lubor Ptacek, long of EMC Documentum, who turned up as a VP of product marketing.
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