Content Management Needs Bottom Deals
Content Management (CM) vendors must tap into the lower-end market to survive in an increasingly cut-throat market says Ovum.
Web management and document management vendors cannot continue to rely on multi-million CM projects, and ignore the huge demand and revenue potential for cheaper, simpler projects of under $100K.
The market reality is contrary to the current perception that all is well in the CM industry. The strong double-digit growth of players like Documentum in the document-focused market hides a decline in revenue of up to 70 percent by vendors such as BroadVision in the web-focused market.
“The bottom has dropped out of the market for large-scale sophisticated and expensive web-focused content management systems,” says Chris Harris-Jones, analyst at Ovum. “The few thousand deals of this nature happened in the last two or three years when most blue chip companies first deployed their online strategies,” he says.
“In addition, most companies’ website requirements nowadays are basic: very few actually need the level complexity of pure-play retail sites like Amazon’s, for example. The high-end market is now saturated and the present market mostly consists of maintenance and upgrade projects that cannot sustain previous revenue levels,” Harris-Jones says.
As companies realise their internal content is in chaos, there is a strong demand for structure and a more efficient organisation of content. Document-focused content management vendors are fairing significantly better than their web-based counterparts.
But again players are neglecting the lower-end of the market and missing out on big revenue opportunities.
The software currently available is very expensive to purchase and implement.
“There is real opportunity for simple, therefore cheap, enterprise-wide systems to provide reliable but straightforward document-focused management on every desk” says Harris-Jones.
“The demand has never been satisfied. We need vendors to effectively do for content management software what Microsoft has done for office automation tools.”
“Significantly, none of the content management vendors generate revenues in excess of $300m, but the market has enormous potential running into tens of billions”, says Harris-Jones.
The volume of unstructured content worldwide is now running into exabytes (1018 bytes), and is increasing annually by 50 percent. Companies are already drowning in a sea of information and unless it is brought under control the situation will only get worse. “Content management has a great future, but the challenge for the existing vendors is to take a really significant slice of this and make it their own,” concludes Harris-Jones.
Delicious
Digg
Reddit
Magnoliacom
Newsvine
Furl
Google
Yahoo
Technorati
Comments
Post new comment