European ECM & DMS markets set to double every year
Three organizations have recently shown their hands on the development of the market for content and document management, and all are moderately to very positive.
The lessening recession in the US and the good spring weather seem to have combined to erase the heavy burden of 9/11 and rekindle expectations for the European content sector.
Market researchers Frost and Sullivan say the European market was worth 485
million US dollar last year, while it will develop to 2,2 billion US dollar in 2007, or almost five times growth, roughly indicating a doubling every year.
The German VOI, the association for information systems said after the recent
CeBIT-fair it sees the future quite bright, especially since the demand for DMS remains high in Germany, fuelled last year by the German tax
office's acceptance of electronic tax returns and electronic business records, including electronic signatures.
Worldwide IDC says both markets will reach over 26 billion US dollar worldwide in 2006.
Frost & Sullivan as well as the other organizations see both enterprise content management and DMS integrate at ever higher speed, driven by the
demand from the larger companies that are already aware these two are in
fact each others complements.
Frost & Sullivan see some advantages for makers of DMS over makers of
pure CMS, such as Documentum, FileNet, and Stellent as they have more
experience in providing non-experienced users with simple interfaces.
But users demand they adapt to an open standard such as XML, and for some of the
older companies this is not so easy.
Times will not be so easy for the smaller scale providers of web content management systems only such as Day, Interwoven, Mediasurface, Pironet, Gauss, Tridion or Vignette.
They must develop into enterprise content management systems to remain on the market. But Gauss, for instance, heavily
into debt and shaken by a manager's falsified 'order of the century' in February, still managed to attract new capital and clients.
Most larger systems makers are reporting new business regularly this spring. And yet
almost all have run into some kind of financial hardship, but most persevere, rescaling and finding new executives to replace the first generation founding fathers.
Frost & Sullivan hardly touch on the even smaller scale systems, of which in Germany alone there are an estimated 250, which have a limited but feasable local life span, even if they do not go XML or Europewide. Examples of these homegrown products exist in all countries on the continent, and some are
giving good value for money to the user with limited aspirations and budgets.
Also, the open source CMS-movement - represented by the likes of the American Zope and Cofax (the latter developed for news by Knight Ridder), the German OpenCms promoted by Framfab, Finnish Midgard and the Dutch MMbase, all international players - is gathering some speed in Europe and just had its first conference in Zurich last month.
But its future is unclear because of the lack of market data on this niche.
In any case, many non-technical users such as editors shy away from open source solutions as the need for specific technical knowledge is apparent from day one.
And then there are the giants of ERP, such as SAP, also busy with their portal management strategy that offers the advantage of seemingly seamless
integration with other ERP-applications.
The VOI has also published a market overview on the German DMS-providers,
prepared together with the Darmstadt polytechnic and Infosoft AG.
At the launch last month, managing director Henner von der Bank, of the VOI said he witnessed a new round of investments, also judging by optimistic reports from the 200 members of the VOI.
Delicious
Digg
Reddit
Magnoliacom
Newsvine
Furl
Google
Yahoo
Technorati
Comments
Post new comment