European Content and Document Applications Market Set to Surpass $4Bn by 2005, say analysts
1 October 2001
The European content and document applications market is set to continue growing at a fast pace, reaching over $4 billion in value by 2005.
Last year, this market grew at 102% over the previous year while the worldwide packaged software market grew by just 12%.
While part of this growth can be explained by the entrance of a myriadof small companies to this market last year, the major growth was still driven by large, established companies, most of which grew at a rate of over 100%.
"Last year the market focus shifted from products aimed at the Web content management arena, to those tailored to enterprise content management" says Nathaniel Martinez, senior research analyst with IDC's European software group.
"This latter market will continue to experience robust growth rates as enterprises endeavor to solve their growing problems of scattered information and duplication of effort."
Despite the current economic downturn, IDC's forecast remains cautiously optimistic, fueled by different factors:
· Content and document management software and related technologies are not volatile markets and are critical to the management of today's businesses.
· Software sales have historically been less affected by economic downturns than other segments of IT. Software is often viewed as one-time investment that
can eliminate some continuing labor costs.
· Enterprises have only begun to face the need for more efficient text handling software. If text documents makes up 70-80% of all enterprise documents, then locating them, mining their contents, and ensuring that previous work is not duplicated will become critical to enterprises. The next generation of content management and information access products is just arriving on the market to handle these demands.
· Government agencies and large enterprises are seeking content management software that will pull together the proliferating subsystems in departments and sub-agencies. These will large, expensive systems whose sale will increase vendors' revenues.
· Finally the need for better and more comprehensive decision making requires state of the art, focused information handling and finding systems. For knowledge-dependent enterprises, this capability is critical. Western European Content and Document Management
www.idc.com

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