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Jumat, 03 Februari 2012

ECM Forester Wave

Forrester Wave Q4 2011: Fragmenting Enterprise CMS, 12 Firms,Targeted Content

Yesterday we saw in the Forrester Wave for Enterprise CMS Suites 2011 for Q4 that there is a shift in the enterprise CMS market away from the big, lumbering giants of a couple of years ago toward more content-centric apps designed to fulfill a specific business function. Today, we’ll take a look at how some of the major vendors are dealing with this challenge.
Before looking at them, though, let's take a quick look at the methodology Forrester used to pick the 12 vendors it assessed; that way no one can be accused of bias in relation to one product over another and preserve us all from heated discussions on the matter.
So how did Forrester arrive at the list of 12 vendors, and why this 12? There are, after all, as many vendors as there are grains of sand on a beach — well, actually that’s an exaggeration because there isn’t, but there sure are a lot of them.
Forrester says it developed the list from an initial pool of vendors that was narrowed down based on:
  • Product fit
  • Customer success
  • Forrester client demand
Vendors that had limited customer references and products that didn’t fit the scope of the evaluation were eliminated. The evaluation criteria were then drawn up based on product qualification, lab evaluations, questionnaires and demos with client references.
Evaluations were sent to the vendors for their review and the evaluations were adjusted to provide a better view of the offerings.
Forrester, in devising these criteria, gave default weightings to reflect the needs of large user companies and/or other scenarios as outlined in the Forrester Wave report.
This is an important point and one that should be kept in mind looking at the companies as it means not all vendors were even considered, with a considerable number excluded.
Ultimately, like the Gartner Magic Quadrant reports, they only reflect a segment of the market; any company that is considering investing should consider all vendors in the market to provide the kind of products the enterprise is looking and not base it solely on the contents of these reports.

The Four Horsemen of Enterprise CMS

As an overview of the market then, Forrester titles with the interesting heading: The Four Horsemen lead while role players address specific content areas. We quote this verbatim to show that it is Forrester that came up with the apocalyptic reference, and not us.
In case you weren’t aware, the Four Horsemen in question are: EMC, IBM, OpenText and Oracle
If you wanted a proper analogy, though, devil worship might be better place to start. Placing your trust in large enterprise CMS suites to do everything your enterprise needs to get done is like holding a Black Mass; an interesting concept, but ultimately pointless — what you’re waiting to appear for just ain’t gonna happen.
Opinions aside, this is the point of this "Wave" report: Businesses are slowly coming around to the realization that, to carry out business needs, they will probably have to turn to specific applications, rather than all-encompassing suites — the point being that they really aren’t all encompassing at all.
Turning back to the apocalyptic horsemen, Forrester has identified a market where:
  • EMC, IBM, OpenText and Oracle continue to lead the pack across all enterprise CMS technologies, delivering comprehensive suites of technology that can provide wide spectrums of functionality.
  • Microsoft has extended the enterprise CMS use of SharePoint, enabling it to move into two of the technology areas that we identified yesterday: Foundational and business. The lack of support for the imaging and output management technologies leaves Microsoft as a Contender in the transactional area.
  • Hyland just keeps building out its functionality to address new technology areas such as team collaboration technology, or records management. It doesn’t have a lot of support for persuasive or global enterprise deployments, which is holding it back.
  • ASG, HP, Laserfiche, Perceptive and Xerox provide rich functionality with a narrow focus, offering capabilities aimed at specific technology areas.
  • Open-source Alfresco continues to develop as an alternative to proprietary players with its focus on foundational and business content providing organizations with a low-cost alternative
Forrester Wave ECM 2011 Q4 Overall
Forrester Wave ECM 2011 Q4 Overall

ECM vendor

Islands of Incompatible ECM Systems BE GONE!

Islands of incompatible ECM systems be gone! so say the major (IBM, EMC, Alfresco, OpenText, SAP (an ECM vendor?), and Oracle) ECM vendors. (Would Microsoft even been known as an ECM vendor two years ago?) These vendors, who have traditionally competed for bandwidth at client sites, gartner quadrant have come together to launch an Enterprise Content Management standards effort called "Content Management Interoperability Services" (CMIS, for short).
Once adopted and implemented, CMIS promises to make it easier to move content across disparate content repositories. It will also make it less costly and burdensome for developers to create applications that leverage Content Management repositories.
Why have competing companies decided to play nice? It could be that they've put what's good for the ECM industry ahead of fighting for market share; but it's more likely that they've come to believe that the "E" in ECM can't be fully realized (and capitalized upon) until interoperability is made possible.
I like John Newton's explanation: "The pain of not having a standard has to be big enough for people to overcome their natural tendency to protect their own turf. That comes when a critical mass has been reached in the market. With the ECM market now at $4B, you can argue that it is long overdue."  At this point, CMIS is big news primarily for ECM vendors and service providers. Companies like Pfizer, who are working to standardize on only two ECM technologies (they've chosen Documentum and SharePoint), are unlikely to cease eradicating other-ECM vendor apps (like OpenText). But two years from now? Five years from now? Ten years from now when CMIS is predicted to be as widely adopted as SQL?
According to the Proposed Charter for OASIS Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) the initial deliverables will cover:
  • Collaborative Content Applications

  • Portals leveraging Content Management repositories

  • Mashups

  • Secondary deliverables include:
    • Workflow and BPM-centric applications utilizing Content
    • Archival Applications
    • Compound and Virtual Documents
    • Electronic and Legal Discovery
    And the following are currently out of scope:
    • Records Management and Compliance
    • Digital Asset Management
    • Web Content Management
    • Subscription and Notification Services
    What does all of this mean to you if you don't work for an ECM vendor? That years from now working with disparate ECM systems will be easier. Should you do anything different right now? No, according to EMC's Andrew Chapman. Here's the footnote that accompanies his CMIS blog post.
    "Important foot note...don't start planning anything around this just yet...the proposal needs to become a standard and then the vendors need to re-engineer their repositories, services and clients before you can take advantage of this. McNabb suggests 3 to 5 years before you'll see something to deploy. "