markets are front and center. Here are three big trends in our markets.
One thing won't be a surprise in 2008: SharePoint. True to form, it took Microsoft
three tries to make an impact in the ECM market. But in just a couple of short years
Microsoft has sold more ECM licenses than all other vendors - combined.
SharePoint is now the fastest growing product in Microsoft history. All of this has
happened despite some significant functionality gaps and lingering questions about
scalability. Microsoft will continue to be a dominant player, but there are still plenty
of opportunities in the market, especially for those vendors who build connectors
that allow SharePoint to act as an "ECM middleware" or those who provide
additional modules to fill gaps.
One impact of SharePoint has been positive for the other ECM vendors.
multiple ECM investments need to figure out what role
of standardizing document repositories and document lifecycles to enable truly
enterprise solutions. While this will still be more of an objective than an
achievement in 2008, the resulting activity and enterprise licensing agreements have
made the ECM market larger for the traditional ECM vendors as well.
Another impact of SharePoint has been that many organizations see their ECM
architecture in "Best of Breed" terms instead of as a single ECM suite. This trend
has been particularly positive for both add-on ECM products and the ECM
consultants and integrators who have the base of experience and the ability to design
and implement these solutions.
repositories.
Critical
The onslaught of information in modern organizations is overwhelming. Many
organizations are using tools that augment their ability to find information through
automated search and categorization because they have no other choice.