Total Cost Of Ownership For Enterprise Content Management

By Alfresco

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is traditionally thought of as very expensive to license and extremely costly to roll-out and scale. Additionally, it often requires expensive hardware and supporting software in the underlying stack.

For a long time, the ECM industry was dependent upon a model based on high cost and complexity, with the vendor controlling the customer through proprietary power. ECM pricing models are often as complex as the product offering, with literally thousands of options for customers to consider when pricing a product configuration. Customers are not clear on what "extras" are required to deliver a working system, what fair value is based on usage, or what rights they have regarding software use.

As a result, it is difficult for customers to understand and control the total cost of ownership of ECM. These "hidden extras pricing models" continue because they are an important source of revenue for some enterprise software companies. However, the lack of transparency on true pricing has major implications when an audit occurs.

Fortunately, there is now an alternative. The most scalable collaboration sites and websites in the world now run on open source software. These Web 2.0 sites have commoditized the scaling process and changed the way content is both accessed and mashed-up. In short, given their requirements, they would not be affordable or economical without open source. They have changed the economic landscape of both ECM and Reliability, Availability and Scalability (RAS).