Ah! A new year! Plenty of projects to get done and the ever-popular predictions about the future. With the economy bouncing back in certain quarters, look for another solid year from the content management industry. Here is part one on few predictions for 2011.
OpenText and Autonomy make acquisitions. Ok, so I am not exactly blazing a new trail here with these two: both companies have grown aggressively by buying other companies. One problem is that there are fewer companies for each to purchase that make good business sense. Both companies are known for their investment discipline (especially OpenText), but as the pace of growth slows they will be forced to stretch for acquisitions in fast growing niche markets.
Oracle or HP break out and join the Big 3. Oracle and HP have both quietly made good progress with acquisitions that are now a few years old. Oracle has been especially active by integrating large parts of their ECM sourcecode into the underlying Oracle database. Neither can challenge IBM, EMC, or OpenText in terms of new license sales, but look for one of these vendors to finally break out and make a credible climb into the upper echelon.
eDiscovery gets more important. All of the major vendors have made investments in either solutions or complimentary solutions for eDiscovery. There are a variety of products in the broadly-defined eDiscovery market and selecting the various components is often confusing for customers. Look for OEMs and customers to both look for more integrated solutions that bridge the life cycle from content creation to litigation. End users are learning that a little planning and prudent use of technology can go a long way to reducing litigation costs in the future.
Shared Drive Cleanup. As a nation of digital packrats, one of the biggest needs for organizations is to clean up their content, especially for shared drives. Some projects are showing that 50% or more of the documents are “eTrash” that can be safely eliminated. This has huge savings in terms of storage, back-up, system performance, litigation costs, and more. Paybacks of just a few months are not uncommon making shared drive clean-up projects among the most cost effective in the history of computing.
Auto Classification gets Better. As organizations clean up their data, they also increasingly realize that they need to classify it into appropriate buckets for records management purposes. But with such much content already out there – and some estimates showing that content growing by up to 80% per year – it is impossible for the content to be manually classified. One recent project had an estimate of $29M for manual classification. The new auto classification technologies that link directly to the ECRM repositories are frequently being adapted from the eDiscovery market (think products like Stored IQ and Kazeon) to reduce the costs.
Do you agree, disagree, or have your own predictions? Be sure to add them! Next week we'll add part 2.
#OpenText #Oracle #ElectronicRecordsManagement #StoredIQ #EMC #e-discovery #Records-Management #ERM #Autonomy