The Enterprise Content Management Blog

Microsoft, The ECM Wolf In Sheep's Clothing

 I caught wind of this Microsoft landing page (Office Online) via one of Forrester's blogs written by Kyle McNabb.

I'm reading the first passage and I'm thinking this is good. I'll have access to my big unwieldy ECM islands with a warm and fuzzy Sharepoint interface configured just for my department.

"..existing FileNet customers can now take advantage of the ease of use, familiar interface, and favorable price points of Office SharePoint Server 2007 to extend the benefits of ECM to every employee in their organization.."
                                                                                          

But wait, keep reading and boom! The software wolf in sheep's clothing appears and pitches to replace your FileNET infrastructure with a discounted version of SharePoint.

"Until June 30th, 2007, Microsoft is running a promotion to offer a 25 percent discount off the regular price of Office SharePoint Server 2007 and CALs with purchase of three-year Software Assurance (SA) to FileNet customers that migrate their FileNet ECM solution to Microsoft's ECM solution."

I won't beat the dead horse when it comes to Redmond versus the other ECM vendors. Kyle describes at least one of Microsoft's characterizations well enough.

"Being good at managing business-content - project documents created in Word, financial plans created in Excel, sales presentations created in PowerPoint - doesn't automatically translate into being good in high volume transactional-content processes such as mortgage origination; new account opening; claims processing; case management; or underwriting."

Fair enough, although I'm sure there's some Microsoft solution providers who'd beg to differ. Kyle backed off a bit to close.

"To their credit, Microsoft's aligned themselves with a few vendors that understand these high volume transactional-content processes including Hyland Software, KnowledgeLake, Kofax, Captaris, and Tecmasters."

That's a respectable set of vendors but certainly not household enterprise software names. In any case, the wars between SharePoint and the incumbent ECM'ers is good for everyone..breeds competitiveness.  

Technorati tags: microsoft, ibm+filenet, ibm, ecm, microsoft+ecm, sharepoint, MOSS+2007, kofax, hyland, knowledgelake, captaris, tecmasters, forrester+research, emc+vendors, kyle+mcnabb

Do Customers Lose if IBM and FileNET Win?

According to the latest highly scientific poll sampled from  ECM blog readers like you, the answer is yes. Sort of. In a dead heat, almost 30% of you said IBM and FileNET will prevail against the other ECM vendors. And an identical percentage (29.7%) thought customers will get the short end of the ECM stick.

Should we really be surprised that customers view things so unfavorably? Not really. Historically, you could probably analyze any big merger or buyout and see there was plenty of doom and gloom predicted by customers and channel partners.

So what can we really expect from IBM and FileNET?

 From a technology perspective, you have to think that IBM's commitment to everything-SOA should bear fruit in the FileNET orchards at some point. I'm sure customers wouldn't mind seeing more service-orientation and content management 2.0 (thanks John Newton) capabilities baked into FileNET P8. Hell, just giv'em RSS to get workflow updates and you'd probably appease an army of them immediately. Another technology bonus should be a better engine driving the federated search capabilities within FileNET P8. It's IBM technology after all, via the Venetica acquisition a while back.This has to be a little higher on everybody's radar right now with the market finally realizing that managing unstructured data is a big, big, challenge for any company. All the ECM integrators I've spoken to have resurfaced their enterprise search practices to address customer demand. I'm not saying Venetica IBM's Federated Search can attack unstructured content like say, an Autonomy, but if IBM and FileNET can't provide enterprise search across everybody's repositories they'll definitely lose some seats --not to mention mindshare. But all that's just technology and most business people don't really care about the technology, right? All they need is the usual checkboxes --- standards-based, viable vendor, flexible configuration options, you know the drill.

What about the industry as a whole? 

We'd all agree ECM is white hot right now and with that climate comes wannabes, pretenders, snake oil salesmen, and providers hocking solutions you didn't even know you needed. But it also provides ample limelight for contenders, upstarts,and  paradigm shifts. So will BlueNET stay agile enough and adapt? Of course, IBM isn't fading anytime soon and has deep enough pockets. But a bigger question might be, what will BlueNET evolve into as ECM becomes more and more the domain of the bigger infrastructure vendors? With ECM vendors disappearing like client-based software,I think you'll see the ECM designation start to fade over the next few years and be consumed by this larger notion of information management. The big boys will have bought up the remaining pure play ECM'ers (Open Text,Stellent,Vignette,Interwoven) and killed off the rest of the Euro-CMS entrants and you'll be left with five or six purveyors of ECM capabilities, most likely IBM,EMC,HP,MSFT,and Oracle.

Technorati tags: ecm, ecm+solutions, filenet, IBM, content+management, ecm+vendors, HP, microsoft+ecm, EMC+documentum

Microsoft's Second Mover Advantage in ECM

Russ Stalters has predicted some of the ECM consolidation for a while and FileNet has been one of the hot topics as of late. In addition to the takeover speculation, he mentions the undeniable Microsoft effect. "FileNet claims that they are partnering with Microsoft and announced “FileNet is introducing broad support for Microsoft SharePoint Technologies” back in May during the AIIM conference."
The announcement hasn't seemed to make much of an impact. Has there even been a joint customer win announced? I think once Office 2007 is more established and Sharepoint is the de facto for departmental collaboration, you'll see FileNet's market share start to erode. The other scary part is when some of the MSFT partners start building specialized imaging and capture applications. Those existing imaging systems won't be ripped out for a while, but the new deployments will start to move into Sharepoint environments due to end-user familiarity. Granted, all this will take a while but Microsoft has proven time and time again they're the best at creating the "second-mover advantage".

Technorati Tags : microsoft, ecm, ecm+vendors, ecm+statistics, filenet, documentum, open+text, content+management

The Microsoft Effect on ECM

Here's more evidence of Microsoft's influence on the ECM space.

"Other content management vendors (notably Open Text) also say they'll work with, rather than compete against, Microsoft's coming technology. There's room for both, they say, because Microsoft will deliver generic building blocks at a low cost, while the high-end vendors will add industry- and application-specific solutions on top of that infrastructure."