December 05, 2007

Demand for ECM systems will climb sharply, says Datamonitor

Email archiving need 'driving growth'

By Computerworld UK reporter

Demand for enterprise content management systems will climb sharply over the next five years to be worth £1.75bn annually by 2012, according to analyst group Datamonitor.

The analyst firm said that its research among 800 CIOs and IT managers showed that on average four out of five companies are deploying some form of a content management system, but most of these deployments are limited in scope, addressing only a particular information management challenge, such as records management or digital asset management.

Datamonitor is forecasting that, in an effort to scale up overall content management capabilities, around one in five enterprises will renew an existing ECM investment within the next six months and the market as a whole will register compound annual growth rate of 13% in the next few years.

Content management technologies, in their various flavors, now figure at the top of enterprise IT investment priorities, said Vamshi Mokshagundam, ECM analyst at Datamonitor and author of a new report, 'Understand adoption of content management solutions'.

Mokshagundam said enterprises are facing the dual challenge of complying with the ever increasing burden of regulation and remaining successful in a fiercely competitive business environment, and content management solutions was potentially an effective means to address both these challenges together.

He said ECM offered a means of tracking, organising and managing all the information generated in an organisation, both structured and semi-structured . He said it most pervasive use was for document management, records management, digital asset management, web content management, email archiving and enterprise search, but email archiving was likely to be at the forefront of ECM growth in the next five years.

"As the workplace paradigm inexorably moves towards employee collaboration via email, intranet and new media such as blogs and wikis, enterprises are quickly realising the need to retain and harness the unstructured content generated from these activities," said Mokshagundam. There was, he added, an "escalating interest in email archiving solutions, driven by compliance requirements and the adoption of risk management approaches aimed at evading litigation risks."

But ECM investments won't just be made by big enterprises, said Datamonitor. The analyst group said it expects close to 70% of global investments in ECM over the next five years to be driven by the small and mid-market (SME) segment. It said SME enterprises were primed to make substantial investments into content management, with the availability of ECM technologies as both suites and point solutions, along with a strong case for positive returns on investment, driving the uptake.

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