ECM Briefs

This week Forrester Research published The Forrester Wave™: Records Management, Q1 2007, published on March 14, 2007 and authored by Barry Murphy, with Connie Moore. The report provides an excellent overview of what analyst Barry Murphy calls the “rapidly growing” records management market. You can find an executive summary of the Forrester report at www.forrester.com. And we have pulled together a variety of helpful resources here.

In addition to the traditional drivers of compliance regulations such as Sarbanes Oxley and SEC Rule 17a-4, Forrester reports that litigation is the “hot new driver” in RM as enterprises seek to address the challenges presented by the new amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure that took effect on December 1, 2006.

According to the report: “Over the next five years, North American businesses and government agencies will spend close to $5 billion on eDiscovery technology alone — technology that helps collect, process, review, and produce information in response to internal or regulatory investigations and litigation. RM tools can play a role across the whole process, especially in helping proactively collect and manage information.”

As part of our focus on providing enterprises with a complete eDiscovery solution, we partnered with TCDI, one of the experts in this segment, to create Livelink ECM -- Litigation Management, which we announced last year. This enterprise software “mashup” has proven to be an ideal fit, combining our proven records management solution with TCDI’s leading collection, review and production tools. This approach allowed us to introduce an end-to-end litigation readiness solution in less time and with more features than would have been possible otherwise.

As this shows, compelling mashups aren’t just limited to the Web or mapping applications – the concept applies in many areas of software development.