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The world has come a long way since the introduction of electronic document management systems (EDMS) software products in 1980s, which aimed at solving problems arising out of complexities related to workflow, imaging, and document management. Various application areas that included ECM are Document Management, Web Content Management, Document Imaging, Records Management, Digital Asset Management, Media Asset Management, Collaboration and Computer Output to Laser Disk, etc. There are strong indications of rapid adoption of Records Management, Digital Asset management, and Web Content Management.

Software companies came up with solutions for each of these segments. The idea behind all these software applications was to save time and improve productivity. But, the key issue at that time was that these applications addressed only specific needs of specific departments and was not having a capability to help the entire organization in managing its content. This resulted in solution providers coming up with Enterprise Content Management (ECM) meant to be a panacea for all the content related needs of enterprises. These increased activities are visible in the Gartner study on ECM, which puts growth of market at 12% per year through 2010 to grow to $4.2 bn in 2010.

The Need for ECM
Unstructured content spread across enterprises creates multiple problems, impacting businesses. The sheer volume of data that is increasing day by day is making enterprises think about the ways to manage them in order to stay ahead of the competition. The need to make information available at a time when it is required has gained crucial importance. According to Kaushik Bagchi, country manager, IM, SWG, IBM India/SA, To stay competitive, companies must respond to a dynamic, competitive business environment by making business process changes inside their organizations as conditions change outside. These processes are often dependent upon one or many forms of content, which must also be leveraged and properly managed for compliance.

Diwakar Nigam, managing director of Newgen Software, expresses similar views: Managing compliance and ensuring control over contents while removing redundancies and ensuring completeness of content are some of the key challenges before enterprises.

The problem of increasing content has been compounded by equally increasing number of users accessing the content. It poses additional challenges for the IT department. According to Kaushik Bagchi of IBM SWG, IT departments face an ever-growing need to open doors for more users to easily and quickly access the content they need, while providing retention and records management, content security and protection.

Key Trends
The ECM market has witnessed maturing of solution portfolio. The type of data that is stored and accessed by enterprises has also undergone a tremendous change. According to Bagchi, The ECM market has been transformed over the past 10 yearsfrom a collection of static repositories housing large volumes of images, forms, and other unstructured data, to a strategic asset that enables customers to reap the benefits of critical business efforts, such as SOA, and business process management and compliance. Content is no more standalone without any relationship with overall businesses. It is, according to Bagchi, becoming more integrated with business processes including loan origination, claims processing (insurance and healthcare), underwriting, policies and contracts, new drug development, case management, and customer service.

India is still a new market for ECM kind of solution. According to Nigam, Worldwide, large organizations have implemented ECM for efficient working or reducing paper-based processing and building knowledge bases. India still lags behind this mindset unfortunately. At the moment, though compliance is being talked about in the country, real implementation is happening only in few cases. There appears to be a move by enterprises toward having a single platform. This is strongly suggested by Sridharan Sankaran, director, Content Management and Archiving India Center of Excellence, EMC. We are also seeing companies gradually moving toward a completely unified architecture and representing a significant innovation over todays more loosely integrated platforms. Solutions in the market now help customers graduate from traditional content services that address creation, management, delivery, and archival of content. IBMs Bagchi shares similar viewpoint, saying, Customers are making platform standardization decisions for ECM and are buying solutions that help build their core enterprise infrastructures.

Eying big opportunities, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, and EMC got into this business. IBM acquired the leading ECM player FileNet to further strengthen its content management capability of Websphere Information Integrator. It may be recalled that, prior to FileNet, IBM had acquired Ascential in 2005 to gain data integration expertise.

Though compliance is being talked about in India, real implementation is happening only in a few cases Diwakar Nigam, managing director, Newgen Software	Investment in an ECM solution is more strategic than before; it is more than just document management Rafiq Somani, country manager, PTC-India	To stay competitive, companies must respond to a dynamic, competitive business environment Kaushik Bagchi, country manager, IM, SWG, IBM India/SA	Companies are moving toward a unified architecture from todays more loosely integrated platforms Sridharan Sankaran, director, Content Management and Archiving India Center of Excellence, EMC

Open Source and ECM
Apart from the products and solutions that are available from traditional ECM vendors, some vendors like Alfresco, eXo, InfoGrid, Jahia, Knowledge Tree, Magnolia, and Nuxeo have come up with solutions based on Open Source. They are providing more choices to enterprises that are looking for a complete solution to manage their content. These vendors claim to offer more ECM features and functionality as they are based on contributions from the open source community, besides offering lower ownership cost.

On the enterprise spending on the ECM solution, Rafiq Somani, country manager, PTC-India, says, Investment in an ECM solution is more strategic than before, as ECM is more than just document management. There is a clear shift of focus from one-size-fits-all to providing solutions that are focused on line-of-businesses and vertical-market ECM solutions that address customers increasingly complex process as well as compliance adherence.

Sudesh Prasad
sudeshp@cybermedia.co.in

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