ECM Briefs

As we kick-off our LiveLinkUp 2007 Conference this week, it’s a perfect time to look at the state of the ECM market today and how much it’s changed over the last year. The outlook for ECM is certainly bright, with industry analyst forecasts for growth ranging as high as 13 percent and CIOs now viewing ECM as a key part of their information strategies. Just a few weeks ago, we announced one of our best years ever for our Fiscal 2007 ending June 30th, and this week, we are enjoying our biggest LiveLinkUp turn out ever. So to what do we owe all this good news in ECM? There are several factors driving the market, but one constant remains: Compliance.

Compliance certainly isn’t a new subject in the ECM industry. In fact, you could say it’s over-exposed as an issue in countless industry forums and articles. But compliance is still among the top concerns of CIOs and CEOs I talk to, as I discussed in a recent podcast interview with eWeek Editor Mike Vizard titled "ECM Meets Compliance".

Today, however, we are rapidly moving beyond the age of compliance for the sake of compliance. To deal with new regulatory mandates, companies have moved through a series of phases: First, they threw money and resources at the problem, then they moved to refine processes, improve controls and reduce costs. Through these first two stages, companies gained a wealth of new information about their operations. Now, these organizations want to use what they’ve learned to improve their business. This is leading to a third stage where companies are developing a more comprehensive, planned approach to managing content, together with new strategies that deliver value and insights by improving process efficiencies and productivity.

Our strategy going forward is to help companies succeed in this third stage by enabling a comprehensive ECM strategy. We’re delivering capabilities that are helping customers manage structured and unstructured content from multiple systems in combination across their organizations. With the new Open Text Content Services we announced this week, we are giving customers the most powerful capabilities available today to access, manage and leverage all business content across the enterprise.

We have the expertise, track record and partnerships to deliver true enterprise-wide ECM deployments. And as an independent company, we don’t have a larger corporate agenda aimed at moving hardware or consulting services. Instead we can focus on giving customers powerful solutions to improve information-intensive processes, reduce costs and gain more value from information….and at the same time manage those compliance challenges.