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August 18, 2008
•White Paper: Open Source ECM Growing Through Disruption
By Integrated Solutions magazine
Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen coined the phrase ‘disruptive technology' in his 1995 article Disruptive Technologies: Catching The Wave. The term has gained traction over the years and refers to a technological innovation, product, or service that uses a ‘disruptive' strategy, rather than a ‘revolutionary' or ‘sustaining' strategy to overturn existing dominant technologies or products in a market. Occasionally, a disruptive technology comes to dominate an existing market by filling a role that an older technology cannot, much like smaller-sized flash memory is currently doing for personal data storage. Other times, a disruptive technology successively moves up-market through performance improvements until finally displacing the market incumbents. Digital photography's gradual replacement of film photography is a good example of this pattern.
Many pundits have recently identified two disruptive technologies in the ECM space — Microsoft SharePoint and open source ECM software. Both of these platforms redefine how content is managed and shared and threaten the dominance of ECM legacy systems in the business community. Open source ECM software, for example, is software where the source code is available to users and permits them to study, try, modify, and improve the software. This model is changing the ECM paradigm and generating interest among the business community because of its free availability, community framework, and innovative features such as social networking capabilities. These characteristics are increasing the popularity of open source ECM and solidifying its reputation as a disruptive technology to watch closely.
The first open source ECM software platforms became available in 2005, and adoption of this software has been impressive over a short period of time. For example, Alfresco, one of the noteworthy open source ECM vendors on the market, claims to have had more than 1 million free downloads of its system to date. However, this figure provides little indication of how many of these downloads have been nurtured into production-level ECM implementations. A better measure of the traction open source ECM platforms have made in the market can be made by looking at the company's paying customers.
Used with permission from Integrated Solutions magazine
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