Enterprise Content Management Shakeup: It's Not Over Yet

Enterprise content management has turned out to be one of the fastest-growing markets thanks to Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and other government compliance rules regulating how and for how long corporate data must be stored. Mark Gilbert, vice president of research firm Gartner's Content Management Group, estimated the enterprise content management software and services market to be worth between $2 billion and $3 billion annually, with growth in the next few years hitting 10 percent to 12 percent. Given EMC's storage and enterprise content management capabilities, it is now in a position to wrestle for market leadership with IBM, SAP, Oracle and a number of specialty vendors, he said.

In fact, said Gilbert, EMC is missing only one key piece of the puzzle to tie together its various products: technology to unite content from multiple sources. "If EMC is smart, it will acquire a content integration technology firm like Ventica or ContextMedia," he said.

For resellers, some of these deals mean a bigger potential footprint. "We couldn't do Web content management and publishing, or digital asset management before. %85 With Stellent, we can," said Jan Letchman, president of Advanced Data Systems, a Tallahassee, Fla.-based Optika partner.

Despite the tech slowdown, content management "has been growing at a fairly good clip," said Lynda Brooks, vice president of sales and marketing at Thomas Technology Solutions, a Horsham, Pa., integrator specializing in the field. Smaller, more specialized vendors are adding capabilities to fill in their portfolios, while customers win with fewer, but better, choices, Brooks said. "Consolidation is a normal aspect of a maturing market," she said.

Letchman agreed that, in the short term at least, the consolidation is a good thing. "It's inevitable. There were too many complementary products being offered by too many different companies," he said.

But the big are also getting bigger. IBM Software's purchase of Green Pasture last month was its third content management-related purchase in a year. Green Pasture's expertise in compound document management is a big play in regulated industries, said Janet Perna, general manager of data management for the group.

"There has been a trend for IBM, Documentum and others to broaden out,organizations want a single framework to deal with all their unstructured content, documents, images, digital assets and the like," said Ted Warzecha, analyst with The Meta Group.

Some say pure-play content management companies such as FileNet are on a collision course with other companies buying or building their way into the market. Ken Fitzpatrick, FileNet's chief marketing officer, sees opportunity for partnerships. It's natural, he said, for FileNet to join forces with companies such as Computer Associates International or Veritas Software that provide other pieces of the puzzle, whether it's storage management or network backup and recovery.

JOSEPH F. KOVAR contributed to this story.