IDC recently published a series of studies regarding the future of applications to access and manage content (content management) and digital assets. Overall conclusion: the forecasts for ECM (Enterprise Content Management) and DAM (Digital Asset Management) vendors are looking good but challenges remain.
According to IDC the market for content-related applications (DAM, ECM, CMS, Enterprise Search,…) will continue to grow significantly until at least 2010. The industry is poised to grow with double digit Compound Annual Growth Rates (CAGR).
Business success requires good content access and management
The reason for that success is simple. As IDC states you can’t do business in today’s information economy if you don’t have proper access to your information sources or can’t properly manage your content. Content is the essence of connecting people and putting it at work is key for business success. All too often its power is still underused as we see on websites (hence the growth of WCMS) and in internal applications.
Unfortunately, many big organizations are still in the early days of recognizing the importance of content. A rather saddening finding in this regard is that 40% of organizations still don’t dispose of a commercial CMS and of those who do have one many fail to serve the various groups of users and/or the functionalities they need. In other words: quite some growth opportunities here as well and CMS and ECM vendors still have work to help organizations serve the needs of all stakeholders in the information lifecycle.
Knowing where content sits: a key business differentiator
In the surveys IDC also focused on applications to gain access to information such as enterprise search, text mining and classification software. The research firm found that this market segment grew by 32% to a total of over 976 million USD in 2005. The future in this segment will be mainly for applications which focus on specific vertical business needs, IDC predicts.
We said it before and will keep repeating it: knowing where content sits and being able to rapidly access – and leverage – it in an easy way using ever more clever technologies is a crucial business differentiator.
In that sense there are clear parallels between the power of search, mining and classification as we see them in a consumer context and the enterprise tools where both automated classification and powerful ‘human’ search capabilities enable to leverage content when and where it is needed.
Finally, also good news for the DAM (Digital Asset Management) market where the market is poised to grow by 25% the next five years. Our fellow countrymen at ADAM, who are making impressive progress outside Belgium, will be happen.
Also posted on our CMSCenter website in Dutch.
