Making Sense Of The Disrupted ECM Market

Digital transformation and the challenges of information governance in the digital age are two topics currently dominating the enterprise content management (ECM) market. Toss in cloud services, which continue to reshape collaboration and content management, and it’s clear to see why the ECM space is in a state of disruption.

In an effort to cut through the clutter caused by the disruption, ECM Connection spoke with Dan Lucarini, Chief Marketing Officer at ibml, about the future of the ECM market, why (and for how long) paper still survives, April’s AIIM Conference in New Orleans, and more.

Q: According to Frost & Sullivan, the ECM market is expanding at a compound growth rate of nearly 13 percent. What is driving this?

Lucarini: I think that number is a bit high. Gartner and Forrester have put ECM growth at a more believable 6 to 7 percent CAGR, which is a good rate for a mature technology. Whatever the number, complexity is driving some of the growth of the market. One of the basic functions of an ECM solution is to provide a unified interface to search and share information across a company. Also playing a role is web content around the customer experience journey that must be managed and archived just like paper documents or PDFs. The amount of website content is increasing exponentially, overwhelming storage and legacy ECM systems.

Q: What impact is business process automation having on the industry?

Lucarini: Process automation and optimization have a huge impact on every organization, especially in light of the demand for information driven by Big Data analytics and Digital Transformation. A process cannot go online unless all parts of the process are automated. Document capture plays an important role here, transforming unstructured information and inaccessible physical documents into cloud-ready and purified information usable by online applications.