ECM Consolidation And Its Impact On You

Vendor consolidation isn't only making headlines, it will have a dramatic effect on the way you purchase and implement ECM (enterprise content management) technologies going forward.

Over the past few years the ECM industry has been a poster child for vendor consolidation, marked most notably last year by IBM's acquisition of ECM software veteran FileNet and Oracle's purchase of Stellent. While these mergers and acquisitions certainly make headlines, what effect will they have on the businesses that purchase ECM solutions?

Well, the most immediately evident consumer benefit of ECM vendor consolidation will be in the realm of vertical solutions. Customers can expect to see an emergence of industry-specific solutions in areas like insurance, manufacturing, and financial services that will help end users more efficiently execute business processes unique to these vertical markets. IBM is at the forefront of this movement, but other back end ECM software vendors are following suit. The independent capture software vendors whose products feed into these back end ECM systems are also taking a more vertical approach to developing their solutions to ensure a seamless integration of technologies.

As ECM becomes a standard capability of major IT platform vendors like IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft, the technology will spread to more desktops and will take a big step toward becoming an integral component of the IT infrastructure of all businesses. As a result, ECM tasks will fall more into the hands of everyday knowledge workers in distributed environments, rather than a few skilled professionals in centralized locations.