Is ECM really, finally dead?

By Derick Deleo

For many years now I have heard people say Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is dead. And I have been asked by some whether or not that is true. I certainly do not pretend to be all-knowing, but am rather observant, and as I have said before, I have seen a lot and heard a lot. So if you will allow me to share my thoughts with you on the death of ECM, please read on.

Back 40 or more years ago many organizations were beginning to realize that they had a problem with their content. Hospitals could no longer house the massive amounts of physical patient content, publications needed a way store content that didn’t require more warehouse space, television studios needed a better way to find images and videos for news broadcasts, financial institutions and insurers were running out of space to store physical content, and similar issues existed across every industry and non-profit organization. Microfilm and microfiche (for those of you saying “micro-what?”, Google it) was an early form of digitized content, but it wasn’t very user friendly or easy to manage. Many of these organizations started working with companies like IBM, Accenture, EDS, and others to build custom solutions. And what exploded was a plethora of custom built content management solutions that were costly to maintain.

Then the ECM market came to life with vendors like Wang, IBM, FileNet, Mobius, Documentum, OpenText, the list went on and on as the market evolved. And these vendors made billions selling their ECM products to organizations worldwide. Some continued to innovate and grow and some became legacy solutions with little or no future for various reasons. But quickly new players emerged like Alfresco, Box, Nuxeo, M-Files, and many others. And they began to claim market share once owned by the original players. And many remain today and are attempting to evolve, innovate and reinvent themselves.

Recently organizations have looked at newer technologies like MongoDB (a NoSQL database), Elasticsearch, AWS OpenSearch, S3 storage, and the host of AI services that are openly available and asked themselves “Why are we paying hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars on an ECM system? Why don’t we just build it using the available Cloud-based services ourselves?” And yes, many have undertaken this effort. And now this trend, if it is really becoming a trend, has people saying again that “ECM is dead”. But perhaps what they really mean is that the ECM software business is dead. But neither is really true.

Organizations still have and must manage vast amounts of content for many reasons. And yes, much content is now digital at birth, but it still needs to be captured and managed for business or organizational purposes. I have yet to talk to an organization that has successfully built and is using their own ECM system; but that doesn’t mean they do not exist, it just means I have not talked to them – if you have done so I would love to hear from you about your experience. But recently we have started talking to organizations that are interested in using less costly alternatives to manage content. Some want to leverage open source offerings, some want to look at less complete or extensible alternatives to reduce costs even though it would mean a degradation in features, and some want to build it themselves as I described earlier. And almost all of them are hoping to leverage AI services to help minimize the need for a human in the loop - please do not freak out here, I said minimize, not eliminate. And AI can definitely help in many ways, whether in classifying content, applying metadata or tags to content, analyzing content to streamline a business process, or even creating new renditions of content, the uses are many and varied.

But in the end, organizations are still managing content. So no, ECM is not dead, it’s just continuing to evolve. And we at Maretha are excited about this evolution and are eager to help organizations evaluate and implement a solution that best meets their needs. Whether we leverage our existing partnerships with Hyland/Nuxeo, Orange Logic, Vertesia, or through a more custom approach leveraging open-source options or Cloud provider services, we are eager to help guide you along your chosen path.

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