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Content management market dividing into front office and back office applications
FatWire Software, provider of content management solutions for Web sites, portals, and content-centric applications has announced that it believes that Oracle’s entry into the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) space will help clear up the confusion around the meaning and value of ECM, and help distinguish the market for ECM from the market for applications that put content to work in supporting business goals.
“Sarbanes-Oxley as well as a pending range of European legislation has made controlling content for compliance and risk management both a legal requirement and a best practice,” said Tim Walters, Director of EMEA Marketing and Strategy at FatWire. “Oracle’s approach with their new Oracle Files 10g product – providing fundamental content management services for a wide range of unstructured content – nicely highlights the basic business benefit of ECM rather than the technology. It makes it clear that the most accurate way to understand ECM is to think of it as Enterprise Compliance Management.”
FatWire believes that Oracle’s introduction of ECM tools for the low level, back office control and policing of enterprise content will encourage companies to pose the question that is naturally closer to their commercial interest: Now that the content is reasonably well-managed, what are we going to do with it? “This announcement will assist end users by accentuating the distinction between those vendors that offer compliance frameworks,” said Walters, “and those that offer the kind of solutions that enable organisations to generate business value by putting content to work in Web sites, portals and content-centric applications.”
Content-centric applications, currently being adopted by forward thinking companies, take content management onto the next level. Content combined with business logic is used to influence the behaviour of an organisation’s key stakeholders – customers, partners, and employees – by persuading them to take actions that best support business objectives. The content displayed in such applications is typically relevant, personalised, and context-aware. Most companies are finding that ECM suites are too expensive, too inflexible, and too back office focused to be viable solutions for content-centric applications and dynamic Web sites. Mobile telco operators and other FatWire customers have significantly increased sales by using content-centric applications to deliver highly targeted promotional content.
Walters continued, “Oracle’s move signals that we are already well into what Forrester Research calls the ‘bifurcation’ phase of ECM. Basic content management and content life-cycle control is becoming part of the repository. This trend may be unpleasant for many of the vendors that have pursued an ECM strategy through the acquisition of various point products, since they’ll increasingly find themselves competing with Oracle, IBM, or Microsoft for back office projects. The accompanying trend is the growth of content-centric applications that are more specialised and vertical market specific, which will enable companies to gain competitive advantage by extracting the value inherent in their content.” 13.12.2004, FatWire Software
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